On Anniversary, Bush and Cheney See Iraq Success  —  WASHINGTON, March 19 — On the third anniversary of a war that they once expected to be over by now, President Bush and senior officials argued Sunday that their strategy was working despite escalating violence in Iraq …

GOP Struggles To Define Its Message for 2006 Elections  —  Republican efforts to craft a policy and political agenda to carry the party into the midterm elections have stumbled repeatedly as GOP leaders face widespread disaffection and disagreement within the ranks.

Contractor tiers swell Katrina costs  —  Normalcy eludes city as bodies are still being found  —  NEW ORLEANS — How many contractors does it take to haul a pile of tree branches?  If it's government work, at least four: a contractor, his subcontractor, the subcontractor's subcontractor …

Defiantly Shaky  —  Sen. Harry Reid told reporters last week that it might be true that American voters don't know where Democrats stand, but that they will know by November.  —  That may be a little too late for undecided voters, which is why both House and Senate Democrats …

David Duke Claims to Be Vindicated By a Harvard Dean  —  A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an "Israel lobby" is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke.

Sayed and de Man at Yale  —  The campus that ran off a Nazi propagandist today welcomes one from the Taliban.  —  Three weeks after the New York Times revealed that former Taliban official Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is attending classes at Yale, many at the university still have little to say about the controversy.

'Iraq was awash in cash.  We played football with bricks of $100 bills'  —  At the beginning of the Iraq war, the UN entrusted $23bn of Iraqi money to the US-led coalition to redevelop the country.  With the infrastructure of the country still in ruins, where has all that money gone?

Rumsfeld's Iraq-Germany analogy disputed  —  Former top officials disagree with comparison  —  WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former top officials in two presidential administrations — one Democratic, one Republican — disagreed Sunday with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's characterization …

Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn  —  BALTIMORE — Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom …

He thought it was stylish!  —  Wherever you walk in Cairo, you gonna see something strange... something new!  But that guy in the picture really drew my attention to some new kind of ignorance.  I was standing near my university campus when I saw this guy.

Anti-war protesters in SLC, elsewhere lament apathy  —  By the time the war protesters began their march Saturday morning in Salt Lake City, only about 50 people had gathered.  Their numbers had swelled to about 200 by noon - and that was with a little high-tech help from a marcher who text-messaged friends to join him.

Deaths fall for U.S., rise for Iraqis  —  BAGHDAD — U.S. military deaths during the past month have dropped to an average of about one a day, approaching the lowest level since the insurgency began two years ago, according to a USA TODAY analysis of U.S. military data.

Iraq Update  —  The Iraq operation follows a sadly predictable pattern.  We endure months of non-stop negative press caused by one thing and one thing only: horrible fascist murderers set off bombs in a few of Iraq's provinces, and some street thugs murder each other in reprisal.

OBL Sought 'Joint Operations' with Saddam  —  An Iraqi intelligence document released last week indicates that Osama bin Laden sought to conduct "joint operations" with Saddam Hussein's regime six years before the 9/11 attacks - and was given the green light by the Iraqi dictator.

Bush Approval Steady at 37%  —  Bush has averaged 38% over last four Gallup Polls  —  PRINCETON, NJ — There has been little change in George W. Bush's job approval rating in the last week.  The March 13-16 Gallup Poll pegs his approval at 37%.  This rating is virtually unchanged …

Women at war with the mullahs  —  What drives a woman to risk a fatwa by attacking Islam.  Christopher Goodwin reports  —  It would be hard to imagine a place more remote from the violence and turmoil of the Middle East than this quiet cul-de-sac in the southern suburbs of Los Angeles.