Sunday, Sep 29th
Last update06:31:21 AM GMT
War Glance
Mr Ross, who appeared before the Iraq Inquiry earlier this month, alleged that "deep state" elements were preventing the inquiry from finding out the true reason for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Mr Ross also claimed that the Iraq Inquiry panel, chaired by Sir John Chilcot, was "neither equipped, nor apparently inclined" to challenge witnesses "on the contradictions of their testimonies".
Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.
Suspected US drones have fired missiles into a compound used by anti-government fighters in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt, killing at least 16 people, officials said. The missile strike on Saturday morning occurred in the Angoor Ada area of South Waziristan, official sources told Al Jazeera.
American commanders in Iraq are working to demonstrate that they are clearing the country of tens of millions of pounds of U.S.-made hazardous waste in an effort to rebut claims that U.S. troops are leaving behind a toxic legacy as they withdraw.
Hundreds of barrels of all types and all colors — filled with everything from discarded lithium batteries and oil filters to powerful chemicals such as hydrochloric acid — are stacked in a dusty compound on a U.S. base at Tikrit, north of Baghdad.
Between 1962 and 1971, the US military sprayed an estimated 80 million litres of Agent Orange and other herbicides on Vietnam, the journal Nature reported in 2003.
"I met one family of victims with four blinded children, no eyes - period," Dr Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, a Vietnamese researcher, said in a 2007 interview.
The US military build-up in Kandahar is likely to further strengthen the hold of the Taliban over the vital southern Afghanistan city, a highly respected security organisation said today in a bleak report warning of record Taliban violence and rising civilian deaths across the country.
The report by the Afghanistan NGO Security Office, which monitors trends in violence on behalf of aid organisations, said Nato's counter-insurgency strategy was not showing any signs of succeeding amid rising violence, the unchecked establishment of local militias and a huge increase in attacks on private development workers across the country.
An eight-year-old policy forbidding govenment contractors and employees from engaging in sex trafficking in war zones has proven almost impossible to enforce, despite indications that such activities are occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan
The policy, instituted eight years ago by President George W. Bush and still in effect today, calls for prosecutions of government employees and contractors and suspensions or disqualifications of companies whose workers engage in trafficking. Bush's get-tough language also threatened criminal prosecutions for solicitation of prostitutes because many of the women are forced into the work.
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