Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has introduced legislation that would treat blogs much like internet service providers and hold them responsible for all activity in comments and user profiles. Millions of commercial web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.

According to Think Progress, social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures”—such as deleting user profiles—to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. "These sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and, blogs such as DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries."

McCain's proposal is reactionary and politically-based. When he introduced this legislation to the Senate, he offered no evidence that children are being victimized by people who post comments on blogs. But most of us should be accustomed to this "straight talk" from the Arizona Republican who is running for president as a "moderate."

Three more U.S. service members died in fighting this week, the military said Friday, raising to 54 the number of Americans killed in Iraq in December -- nearly half of them in Al-Anbar, the volatile province west of Baghdad.

The month is shaping up to be one of the deadliest for Americans since the war started, especially for those trying to tame the Sunni-led insurgency in Al-Anbar.

At least 25 of the U.S. troops killed this month -- most Marines -- died in the vast stretch of desert that extends from the capital to the borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Three U.S. aircraft also went down in a span of two weeks, starting with the crash of a fighter jet on Nov. 27.

A few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the CIA station chief in Rome paid a visit to the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, Adm. Gianfranco Battelli, to float a proposal: Would the Italian secret services help the CIA kidnap terrorism suspects and fly them out of the country?

The CIA man did not identify which targets he had in mind but was "expressly referring to the possibility of picking up a suspected terrorist in Italy, bringing him to an airport and sending him from there to a foreign country," Battelli, now retired, recalled in a deposition.

...

This initial secret contact and others that followed, disclosed in newly released documents, show the speed and breadth with which the CIA applied in post-9/11 Europe a tactic it had long reserved for the Third World -- "extraordinary rendition," the extrajudicial abduction of Islamic radicals overseas for interrogation in friendly countries.

A year after the first contact, the CIA officer held another meeting with his Italian counterparts, this time sharing a list of more than 10 "dangerous people" the agency was tracking in Italy, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands, according to a deposition from Gen. Gustavo Pignero, another high-ranking Italian military intelligence official. "It was clear that this was an aggressive search project, that their willingness to employ illicit means was clear," Pignero said, adding that the list was later destroyed and he could not recall the names.

Military planners and White House budget analysts have been asked to provide President Bush with options for increasing American forces in Iraq by 20,000 or more. The request indicates that the option of a major “surge” in troop strength is gaining ground as part of a White House strategy review, senior administration officials said Friday.

...

Discussion of increasing the number of American troops, at least temporarily, has coursed through Washington for two months, as a possible way to reverse the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad. But the decision to ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff to specify where the additional forces could be found among overstretched Army, Marine and National Guard units, and to seek a cost estimate from the White House Office of Management and Budget, signifies a turn in the debate.

Officials said that the options being considered included the deployment of upwards of 50,000 additional troops, but that the political, training and recruiting obstacles to an increase larger than 20,000 to 30,000 troops would be prohibitive.

At present, only about 17,000 American soldiers are actively involved in the effort to secure Baghdad, so even the low end of the proposals being considered by military and budget officials could more than double the size of that force. If adopted, such an increase would be a major departure from the current strategy advocated by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., which has stressed stepping up the training of Iraqi forces and handing off to them as soon as possible. [emphasis mine]

And I'm going to continue to rely upon those commanders, such as General Casey, who is doing a fabulous job and whose judgment I trust, and that will determine -- his recommendations will determine the number of troops we have on the ground in Iraq.

When summer wildfires burn out of control in the vast forests of the Rocky Mountains, the Montana National Guard has always been available to act as a fire force of last resort, sending its soldiers deep into the wilderness to help fire crews, protect evacuated property, and transport supplies to the front lines.

But as fire season approaches this year, the Montana Guard faces what its commander describes as an ''unprecedented" shortage of firefighters and helicopters, prompting the state's governor, Democrat Brian Schweitzer, to ask the Pentagon to return more of the state's troops from Iraq this summer for what he fears could be a particularly dangerous fire season.

U.S. coffers hemorrhaging from increased war spending

U.S. military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions.

The Hartford Courant, citing records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act and more than 100 interviews of families and military personnel, reported numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq.

Field upon field of more than 1,000 battered M1 tanks, howitzers and other armored vehicles sit amid weeds here at the 15,000-acre Anniston Army Depot -- the idle, hulking formations symbolic of an Army that is wearing out faster than it is being rebuilt.

The Army and Marine Corps have sunk more than 40 percent of their ground combat equipment into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to government data. An estimated $17 billion-plus worth of military equipment is destroyed or worn out each year, blasted by bombs, ground down by desert sand and used up to nine times the rate in times of peace. The gear is piling up at depots such as Anniston, waiting to be repaired.

The depletion of major equipment such as tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and especially helicopters and armored Humvees has left many military units in the United States without adequate training gear, officials say. Partly as a result of the shortages, many U.S. units are rated "unready" to deploy, officials say, raising alarm in Congress and concern among military leaders at a time when Iraq strategy is under review by the White House and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

Believe it or not, winning the war in Iraq was never the Bush administration’s highest priority. Saving its tax cuts was more important. That was once spoken of as a moral problem. Now, it’s a practical barrier to a successful outcome.

Until recently, President Bush’s refusal to scale back any of his tax cuts was debated around the question of shared sacrifice: How could we ask so much from a courageous group of Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan but not ask even the wealthiest of their fellow citizens to part with a few extra dollars to support an endeavor supposedly central to our nation’s security? On the contrary, even after we committed to war in Iraq, the administration pushed for yet more tax cuts in dividends and capital gains.

Now we know that the decision to put the war on a credit card is not simply a moral question. The administration’s failure to acknowledge the real costs of the war—and to pay them—has put it in a corner.

The president’s options in Iraq are severely constrained because our military is too small for the foreign policy he is pursuing. Sending more troops to Iraq would place even more excruciating burdens on members of our armed forces and their families. And the brass fears that an extended new commitment could, quite simply, break the Army.

Yet instead of building up our military for a long engagement and levying the taxes to pay for such an enterprise, the administration kept issuing merry reports of progress in Iraq. Right through Election Day this year, the president continued to condemn anyone who dared suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should raise taxes to pay for this war.

I think it would be a mistake to send more troops to Iraq. But for the sake of argument, let’s take seriously the idea that doing so might help, as Sen. John McCain and other staunch advocates of the war insist. By not matching the military’s size to what we are asking it to do, we have hugely raised the costs, including the human costs, of such a policy.

For the first time since Vietnam, an organized, robust movement of active-duty US military personnel has publicly surfaced to oppose a war in which they are serving. Those involved plan to petition Congress to withdraw American troops from Iraq. (Note: A complete version of this report will appear next week in the print and online editions of The Nation.)

After appearing only seven weeks ago on the Internet, the Appeal for Redress, brainchild of 29-year-old Navy seaman Jonathan Hutto, has already been signed by nearly 1,000 US soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, including dozens of officers--most of whom are on active duty. Not since 1969, when some 1,300 active-duty military personnel signed an open letter in the New York Times opposing the war in Vietnam, has there been such a dramatic barometer of rising military dissent.

The U.S. military is planning to move a brigade of troops into Kuwait in what could be the first step of a short-term surge of American forces into Iraq to stabilize the violence.

The 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division is expected in Kuwait shortly after the new year, a senior Defense Department official told The Associated Press on Friday. The official requested anonymity because the plans had not yet been announced.

The 2nd Brigade, made up of roughly 3,500 troops, is based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and would be deployed in Iraq early next year if needed, the official said. The move would be part of an effort to boost the number of U.S. troops in Iraq for a short time, the official said. The plan was first reported by CBS News.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow this week: “The president believes that in putting together a way forward he will be able to address a lot of the concerns that the American public has, the most important of which is, "What is your plan for winning?"

As I’ve noted here and here, it is difficult to find the evidence to support this characterization of American public opinion (Snow’s comment is similar to those made recently by other Bush administration officials, including President Bush himself and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.)

There have been at least nine national polls about Iraq conducted over the last two weeks. I don’t see the evidence that developing a plan for winning is Americans’ most important concern about Iraq.

Americans may be interested in knowing what the administration’s plans are. Americans may endorse the idea that winning in the abstract is a good thing. But the data suggest that the most important concern Americans have about Iraq is: What is the plan for getting the U.S. out of Iraq? There is near universal consensus across all the recent polls that Americans want a timetable for withdrawal, and would like that timetable to set a pace for American troops to be withdrawn within two years.

U.S. and Iraqi forces are struggling to ease sectarian tension in one of Iraq's most volatile areas where much of the population seeking security turns to terrorists, not Iraqi troops or police, a U.S. commander said on Friday.

Army Col. David Sutherland, commander of forces in Iraq's Diyala province, said suspicions of corruption within the Iraqi forces increased support for terrorist groups.

"Public perceptions of corruption, inequity and fear are the driving force behind support to terrorist organizations," Sutherland, speaking on a video link from Baquba, Iraq, told Pentagon reporters.

The Iraqi security force is heavily Shi'ite in Diyala, which is majority Sunni and a major center of sectarian hatred in Iraq.

Attacks on Shi'ites by Sunni insurgents linked to al Qaeda and reprisals by both sides have surged since the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February.

"Some political groups and tribal leaders are turning to terrorist and insurgent organizations for protection," Sutherland said. "This sort of unity only worsens the sectarian divide and encourages further violence.

A recent Gallup Poll finds two in three Americans endorse the re-establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Cuba. Americans' support for diplomacy with the island nation is higher now than it has been in recent years, but Americans have been more likely to support rather than oppose relations for the better part of the past three decades. A majority of both Democrats and Republicans support the idea, although support is somewhat stronger among Democrats. While Americans support a diplomatic relationship with Cuba, a review of Gallup polling finds that a strong majority of Americans have tended to view the country unfavorably over the past 10 years.

What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.

If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project, memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?"

Over the past 10 years, more than 50 young people aged 30 and under were violently murdered by assailants who targeted them because they did not fit stereotypes for masculinity or femininity. The Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC) today released the groundbreaking human rights report "50 Under 30: Masculinity and the War on America's Youth" documenting this tide of murderous violence and the key demographics of its victims and their assailants.

"While many youth who don't fit gender stereotypes for masculinity or femininity face harassment or bullying, when it comes to gender-based murder the victims are specific and consistent," said Riki Wilchins, GenderPAC executive director. "They were mostly black or Latina, were biologically male and presenting with some degree of femininity, and were killed by other young males in attacks of extraordinary and often multiple acts of violence."

The report has spurred a new coalition of civil and human rights organizations including Amnesty International (USA), Global Rights, Human Rights Campaign, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, National Organization for Women, International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission, Safe Schools Coalition, National Education Association's Health Information Network and the US Human Rights Network. These organizations are joining together in educating the public and calling upon policy-makers and law enforcement officials to address the underlying cause of gender-based violence.

"Aggression and violence have become acceptable ways of policing gender performance and punishing the transgression of gender boundaries in American culture. These deaths were often the result of young men using lethal violence to enforce standards of masculinity on other young males who didn't meet cultural expectations of masculinity - especially when they were transgender or gay," said Dr. Michael Kimmel, professor of sociology at Stony Brook University.

"While it is natural and appropriate for Americans to first focus upon the deaths of American service members in Iraq, it's astounding to consider that for every service member killed, 200 Iraq civilians have been killed....

What are the short-term and long-term implications of this massive number of deaths to Iraqi civil society? Will the millions of Iraqi children who have lost a parent ever forgive our country for igniting this violence? How do we make peace with the generations of Iraqis severely harmed by this unnecessary war of choice?"

-- Rep Dennis Kucinich
D-OH

"A president as stupid, venal, and petty as George W. Bush...
By Matt Stoller | AlterNet Dec 14, 2006

...doesn't get elected and reelected without some serious institutional forces at work." The Chamber of Commerce, run by corrupt lobbyist Tom Donahue, has turned into a pay-to-play vehicle for right-wing causes and corporate dishonesty.

...

Now, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce itself is a powerhouse. According to the New York Times, the Chamber has more than three million members, from businesses of every size, sector and region; its 2,800 affiliated state and local chambers give it a presence in nearly every state and Congressional district. It spent more than $53 million o­n lobbying in 2004, more than any organization has ever spent in a year. In 2004, it deployed 215 people in 31 states, sent 3.7 million pieces of mail, made 5.6 million phone calls and sent more than 30 million e-mail messages o­n behalf of its candidates.

...

Despite the obvious interest small businesses have in a free and open internet, the Chamber of Commerce opposes net neutrality. The Chamber wants to weaken or eliminate the Family and Medical Leave Act, the minimum wage, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. They want to cut every possible tax despite massive deficits, privatize Social Security, and just generally pursue the right-wing agenda down the line. Far from a business-friendly umbrella group for its 3 million members, the Chamber under Donahue's management has turned into a pay-to-play vehicle for right-wing causes and corporate dishonesty. As Eliot Spitzer put it, ''Tom Donohue has never o­nce found a crime that he couldn't justify, as long as it was committed by o­ne of his dues-paying members."

Sen. John McCain took his controversial proposal for curbing Iraq's sectarian violence to Baghdad on Thursday, calling for an additional 15,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops and joining a congressional delegation in telling Iraq's prime minister he must break his close ties with a radical Shiite cleric.

The lawmakers' trip came as the bloodshed showed no signs of abating. At least 74 more people were killed or found dead, including 65 bullet-riddled bodies bearing signs of torture. And gunmen in military uniforms kidnapped as many as 70 shopkeepers and bystanders from a commercial area in central Baghdad in what was apparently an attack against Sunnis; at least 25 were later released, police said.

McCain's position puts him at odds with American public opinion and with the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended withdrawing substantial number of U.S. troops over the coming year. The Army in recent days has been looking at how many additional troops could be sent to Iraq if President Bush decides a surge in forces would be helpful.

Words won't kill you unless they are "Ready, aim, fire!". Now that some time has gone by since the Michael Richards rant, let's talk about the true victim of the "n" word; standup comedy. The L.A. Times continues to feature articles on the Laugh Factory, focusing on further "n" word developments, and on black comedians lamenting the loss of their use of the "n" word at the club.

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, far from demanding apologies, should have apologized to Bill Cosby, who tried to point out the heartbreak and social defeat of how some blacks are undercutting their own dignity and chances (did you see "Queens of Comedy"?). It's one thing to use the "n" word when you are an original, like Chris Rock or Bernie Mac, or if you're a genius, like Richard Pryor. It's another matter when you don't have the talent to co opt the enemy. These currently enraged black leaders are about ten years too late in their outrage, and they are mad at the wrong person. By the way, the best black comedian I ever saw was Marsha Warfield. She cut to the bone of race relations, was brilliantly funny, as well as intense, challenging, and seething with rage, and she never used the "n" word once.

Lenny Bruce did the first bit using the "n" word to try and diffuse its power, although the come lately historians bother to go back only as far as Richard Pryor. Lenny said he wanted to use it often enough so that any little kid called that word would never cry again because it would no longer have any meaning. And then he just said the word about ten times in a row, along with every other ethnic epithet he could think of. It was a funny, brave bit with good intentions, but it's now a failed fifty year experiment. Its usage is no longer a noble quest to gut its sting. It's become an intellectually lazy way to fill a job instead of using thought, talent, and skill.

Finally! Someone brings up what I've been thinking since the Michael Richards debacle. There's not a comedy club in America where, on any given night, you don't hear women called bitches, hos and the "c" word yet no one seems bothered. But the "n" word or any hint of anti-Semitism and you get the full minority establishment showing up for a photo op. What gives with that? Why is it okay to insult women? And more to Ms. Boosler's point, why is that funny?

But it wasn't the n-word. It was the lynching imagery ("Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a f***ing fork up your ass ...") and the white privilege ("That's what you get for messing with the WHITE MAN.")

Michael Richards didn't evoke the priesthood of performer vs audience (As in Lilly Von Shtup's, "are you in show business? then get your feet off the stage.") He called on the privilege of the white race. (George Allen: "Lets give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.")

“I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable.”

-- Jules Verne
The Mysterious Island (1874)

Our Aquygen™ is a novel gas produced inexpensively from water. It is a superior replacement for oxyacetylene in most welding, cutting, and heating applications but can be used with standard equipment. Used as an additive to any standard fuel, Aquygen™ increases BTUs while decreasing emissions, dramatically improving the efficiency and cleanliness of transportation and power generation within the existing fueling and energy infrastructure.

...

For vehicle manufacturers, power suppliers, and anyone who burns large quantities of petroleum-based or natural gas fuels, Aquygen™ is a fuel additive that can significantly increase energy production and efficiency while decreasing polluting emissions. Unlike other alternative energy sources, Aquygen™ is an evolutionary technology that requires minimal modifications to existing systems to produce tremendous benefits.

Who had Frank Sandoval become?

Where was the tough soldier who wouldn't quit?

Michelle Sandoval broke down in tears, her brave front shattered as she tried to describe the man her husband had been before that awful day.

Frankie was someone who never gave up. He wouldn't make excuses and he didn't accept them. He always encouraged their young daughter by saying: I don't want to hear you say, ``I can't.'' Just do it.

Now, she was watching him cry and plead those haunting words: I can't.

Frankie never would have done that before.

It was late January, and they had just arrived at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto. Frank could sit up in his wheelchair for only a few minutes. He couldn't feel or control much of his left side. His speech was nearly unintelligible.

And there was the more obvious evidence of his terrible wound: The right side of his head was sunken like a deflated basketball.

Frank now was a face of the modern war casualty. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury -- the emblematic wound of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. These devastating injuries have forever altered the lives of hundreds of U.S. soldiers and Marines, leaving their futures uncertain.

Like Frank's.

It wasn't his physical impairments that upset her most, a tearful Michelle told Harriet Zeiner, a VA neuropsychologist. It was that Frankie seemed not to remember who he really was.

That, Zeiner believed, could be the cruelest part of a brain injury. Losing a sense of who you are.

No one knows how the journey of Frank Sandoval will end. But this is how it began.

Gunmen in military uniforms kidnapped dozens of people today from a commercial area in central Baghdad.

The attackers drove up to the busy al-Sanak area in about 10 SUVs and began rounding up shop owners and bystanders.

Two police officers said 50 to 70 people were abducted.

The assault came nearly a month after gunmen in Interior Ministry commando uniforms abducted scores of men from a Higher Education Ministry office building.

Exports have been aided by a decline in the value of the American dollar, which has made U.S. products more competitive in world markets.

...

The softer dollar is making American goods cheaper for buyers overseas, and together with strengthening economies abroad, it may be contributing to a pickup in exports. The dollar is down 4.8 percent so far this year against a trade-weighted basket of currencies from the biggest U.S. trading partners. [emphasis mine]

"Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was..."

-- Talking Heads
Band

Washington at large and President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in particular may apply every contortionist trick in the geopolitical book to save their skins in Iraq - and the reasons are not entirely political.

In addition to the recently released report by the Iraq Study Group, any other Washington establishment report - Pentagon, State Department, think-tanks - considered by the White House cannot deviate from much of the ISG. There can be no firm timeline for a complete US withdrawal because it all depends on Iraq's new oil law being passed and US troops being able to defend Big Oil's investment.

Once again, it's the oil. The Bush-Cheney system by all accounts went to Iraq to grab those fabulous reserves. The only way for an overall solution to the Iraqi tragedy would be for the Bush administration to give up the oil - with no preconditions, turning the US into an honest broker. Realpolitik practitioners know this is not going to happen.

Instead, the ISG is explicitly in favor of privatizing Iraq's oil industry - to the benefit of Anglo-American Big Oil - after the impending passage of a new oil law that was initially scheduled to be passed this month by the Iraqi Parliament.

For Big Oil, the new oil law is the holiest of holies: once the exploitation of Iraq's fabulous resources is in the bag, "security" is just a minor detail. Enter the ISG's much-hyped provision of US troops remaining in Iraq until an unclear date to protect not the Iraqi population, but Big Oil's supreme interests. This is really what ISG co-head James Baker means by "responsible transition"

"The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others."

-- Bertrand Russell

John McCain has made clear that he doesn’t like the blogosphere.

Now he has introduced legislation that would treat blogs like Internet service providers and hold them responsible for all activity in the comments sections and user profiles. Some highlights of the legislation:

– Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”

– Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.

— Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries. [emphasis in original]

Poll: Most Americans see lingering racism - in others

(CNN) - Most Americans, white and black, see racism as a lingering problem in the United States, and many say they know people who are racist, according to a new poll. But few Americans of either race - about one out of eight - consider themselves racist. And experts say racism has evolved from the days of Jim Crow to the point that people may not even recognize it in themselves.

A poll conducted last week by Opinion Research Corp. for CNN indicates that whites and blacks disagree on how serious a problem racial bias is in the United States.

Almost half of black respondents -- 49 percent -- said racism is a "very serious" problem, while 18 percent of whites shared that view. Forty-eight percent of whites and 35 percent of blacks chose the description "somewhat serious." (See the poll results) Asked if they know someone they consider racist, 43 percent of whites and 48 percent of blacks said yes. But just 13 percent of whites and 12 percent of blacks consider themselves racially biased.

The poll was based on phone interviews conducted December 5 through Thursday with 1,207 Americans, including 328 blacks and 703 non-Hispanic whites.

University of Connecticut professor Jack Dovidio, who has researched racism for more than 30 years, estimates up to 80 percent of white Americans have racist feelings they may not even recognize.

"We've reached a point that racism is like a virus that has mutated into a new form that we don't recognize," Dovidio said. He added that 21st-century racism is different from that of the past.

"Contemporary racism is not conscious, and it is not accompanied by dislike, so it gets expressed in indirect, subtle ways," he said. That "stealth" discrimination reveals itself in many different situations.

A three-year undercover investigation by the National Fair Housing Alliance found that real estate agents steered whites away from integrated neighborhoods and steered blacks toward predominantly black neighborhoods.

The Opinion Research poll shows that blacks and whites disagree on how each race feels about the other. Asked how many whites dislike blacks, 40 percent of black respondents said "all" or "many." Twenty-six percent of whites chose one of those replies. On the question of how many blacks dislike whites, 33 percent of blacks said "all" or "many," while 38 percent of whites agreed - not a significant difference statistically because of the poll's 5 percent margin of error.

About half of black respondents said they had been a victim of discrimination because of their race. A little more than a quarter of whites said they had been victims of racial discrimination.

Outrage over Holocaust conference

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has met delegates at a conference in Iran questioning the Holocaust, drawing widespread international criticism.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned it and British PM Tony Blair called it "shocking beyond belief".

Iran says it wants to debate what it calls taboos surrounding the Holocaust. Conference participants include white supremacists and Holocaust deniers.

Some six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime during World War II.

According to the foreign ministry in Tehran, 67 researchers from 30 countries are attending the conference in Iran, which is home to 25,000 Jews.

Participants include a number of well-known "revisionist" Western academics. American David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, is to present a paper.

Controversial legacy of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet

The date - December 10, the UN's International Human Rights Day - could not have been more symbolic for the passing of a man who best symbolized the international struggle to end impunity for human rights abusers in Latin America.

"It's no consolation to anyone that Pinochet has been subjected to a long legal battle, given that it has never resulted in a condemnation. That's what his victims will lament most about his death," says Sergio Laurenti, executive director of the Chilean wing of Amnesty International.

Pinochet imposed a curfew and ordered mass arrests in an effort to root out opposition. Declaring himself president in 1974, he eliminated Congress, political parties, freedom of speech, habeas corpus, and trade unions. At least 27,000 people were tortured while in detention, and an estimated 3,200 Chileans were killed or disappeared during his 17-year-rule.

Political scientists say that, although many dictators elsewhere in Latin America were responsible for more deaths, Pinochet is the most notorious because of what he embodies.

"He overthrew Latin America's first democratically elected Marxist leader, who himself was a symbol," says Robert Funk, a political science professor at Santiago's Diego Portales University

Pinochet still boasts a decidedly committed following who remember him as a savior.

According to opinion polls, somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the population was still professing their support for Pinochet and his military regime as recently as one year ago, says Claudio Fuentes, director of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, an independent think tank based in Santiago.

Others say there's an element of nostalgia involved. "But more important, what there is in Chile, as there is in the rest of Latin America, is a fetish for authority," says Mr. Funk. "That respect that we see for Pinochet now is in many ways the support for someone who had a strong hand and made things run in a more orderly fashion."

President slips to all-time low in the Zogby Poll as key demographic groups jump ship

Ambassadors to honor female WWII spy.

In 1942, the Gestapo circulated posters offering a reward for the capture of "the woman with a limp. She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies and we must find and destroy her."

The dangerous woman was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore native working in France for British intelligence, and the limp was the result of an artificial leg. Her left leg had been amputated below the knee about a decade earlier after she stumbled and blasted her foot with a shotgun while hunting in Turkey.

The injury derailed Hall's dream of becoming a Foreign Service officer because the State Department wouldn't hire amputees, but it didn't prevent her from becoming one of the most celebrated spies of World War II.

On Tuesday, the French and British ambassadors plan to honor Hall, who died in 1982 at age 78, at a ceremony at the home of French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte in Washington.

After the Gestapo wanted posters made her situation untenable, she fled through the Pyrenees mountains into Spain. During the journey, she sent a radio message to London, reporting that "Cuthbert" — her nickname for her prosthetic leg — was giving her trouble...

returned to France in 1944, disguised as an elderly peasant. She located parachute drop zones where money and weapons could be passed to Resistance fighters and later coordinated guerrilla warfare. Her teams destroyed bridges, derailed freight trains and killed scores of German soldiers.