JORDAN: As hunger increases, so does anger

Hunger ate away at his pride and honor.

Abdullah Eid Hadid, 74, has found that his retirement salary isn't nearly enough to make ends meet in these hard times, especially not in Jordan, where prices are skyrocketing.

"In 2007, we suffered," he said, the creases of age surrounding his eyes like cracks in the desert. "But 2008 is breaking our back. This country is becoming like an ocean. The big fish are eating the little fish."

The anger was palpable among all those interviewed for today's front-page article about how food prices were fueling resentment and extremism in the Middle East as well as undermining U.S. goals for the region. But Hadid's story was perhaps the saddest. He'd given his life and youth to protect Jordan as a policeman and a soldier, first donning a military uniform at age 14. He defended his country during its wars of the past decades.

IRAQ: To feel normal again; warrior athletes compete in San Diego event

Army Sgt. Wallace Fanena, who lost his right arm and leg to a landmine in Kirkuk in September, was up early Sunday morning in San Diego.

Fanena, 25, was among 40-plus members of the Balboa Warrior Athlete Program at the Naval Medical Center San Diego to participate in the Navy's 22nd Original Bay Bridge Run/Walk from downtown across the Coronado Bay Bridge. A record 8,000-plus people made the jaunt.

The warrior athlete program incorporates athletics with rehabitation for military personnel injured in Iraq, Afghanistan or stateside. "Athletics rebuilds confidence," said medical center commander Rear Adm. Christine Hunter, who was among the runners.

The center's Comprehensive Combat and Complex Casualty Care program provides state-of-the-art care for the most severely injured, particularly for amputees.

At its height, the program was caring for 200-plus patients. Now, with a decrease in combat and greater use by the military of blast-resistant vehicles, the number has dropped to about 130.

That's given the program the chance to focus on post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, Hunter said.

Fanena was assigned to an Army unit from Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, when he was injured on his second tour in Iraq. He hopes to stay on active duty. Like several other amputees, Fanena completed the course in a hand-crank bicycle.

"I have to do this to prove something to myself," Fanena said. "I hope to feel normal again."

-- Tony Perry

Photo: Army Sgt. Wallace Fanena prepares for the start of Sunday's 22nd Original Bay Bridge Run/Walk. Credit: Tony Perry/Los Angeles Times

ISRAEL: Lebanese prisoner Samir Kuntar at issue

Samir Kuntar is Israel's longest-held Lebanese prisoner. In 1979, the Druze teenager who had grown up during Lebanon's civil war embarked on an attack against northern Israel, one from which he hasn't returned.

Israel has suffered many attacks over the years, but the one that killed the family of Smadar Haran and a police officer nearly 30 years ago was seared into the nation's collective memory, and the tragic results became a symbol.

So did Kuntar himself. A celebrity prisoner in Lebanon, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has set Kuntar's release as a goal, repeatedly promising to free him and stating categorically that no prisoner swap would take place without him. Israel is loath to free Kuntar.

LEBANON: Protestors warn politicians they're fed up

Think Americans have it bad with their elected leaders?

Consider the Lebanese, whose politicians have somehow managed to bring the country back to the brink of civil war 18 years after the end of the last one.

On Friday, as Lebanon's political leaders headed to the recently reopened airport to fly to Qatar and attempt to resolve their differences, a group of disabled Lebanese, many of them disfigured in the last civil war, gathered at the airport to greet them with a blunt message: If they don't work out a new power-sharing deal, they should just stay away.

"If you don't agree," said signs held up by the demonstrators, "don't come back!!!"

EGYPT: Bush should not expect warm welcome

U.S. President George Bush arrived today in Sharm El-Sheikh for peace talks with his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.

Yet, no warm welcome should be expected, especially when it is believed that he mainly came to the region to celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary. Earlier this week, demonstrators in downtown Cairo protested his visit, accusing him of siding with Israel at the expense of the Palestinians.

Egypt is the final stop in Bush’s Middle East tour after Israel and Saudi Arabia. He first landed in the Jewish state, where he addressed the Knesset to congratulate the Israelis on their country's anniversary.

“Masada will not fall again,” Bush said in his speech Thursday, referring to the Jewish desert fortress that was attacked by troops of the Roman Empire. While the speech was hailed as “historic” by some Israeli papers, it elicited stir in Egypt. The state-owned daily paper Al-Ahram dismissed the speech as inspired by the Torah. 

IRAN: Tehran accuses West of waging war on its turf

Washington's and Tehran’s allegations against each other have a curious symmetry.

Each side blames the other for causing unrest in the region. Both huff and puff through the media. They make arrests. They claim confessions. They point to unspecified evidence, which they never make public.

After weeks of facing escalating allegations that it was arming and training insurgents in Iraq to fight U.S. military forces, Iran is now stepping up its own allegations that the U.S. and Britain were behind a recent attack on a mosque in southern Iran.

IRAQ: Even in war, the prom must go on

By Usama Redha in Baghdad

Even in the middle of a war, nothing will keep students from their prom.

The graduating class at the University of Technology threw a party to remember this year.

Of course in Baghdad, no one wants to stay out too late, so the festivities get started a little earlier than in the United States. From early in the morning, I started receiving text messages on my cell phone from friends who study at the school, telling me that the place was filling up and the fun had begun.

IRAQ: U.S. casualty identified

Army Sgt. Victor M. Cota, 33, of Tucson, Ariz., died Wednesday in Baghdad of wounds suffered Tuesday when his vehicle encountered a roadside bomb in Kadamiyah, Iraq, the Defense Department has announced. He was assigned to the Special Troops Battalion, 4th Infantry Division, Ft. Hood, Texas. At least 4,077 U.S. military personnel have died since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

ISRAEL: Bush thrills Israelis, angers Obama

President Bush received several rousing standing ovations during his speech Thursday to the Israeli Knesset.

Not everyone was quite  as enthused.

Several Arab Knesset members staged a walkout before the speech, and one Palestinian activist angrily dubbed his speech "a love fest" for the Jewish state.

To be honest, there was a lot of love in the air between Bush and his Israeli hosts.

Stating that President Harry Truman recognized the new Jewish state 11 minutes after David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of independence, Bush said, “Israel's population may be just over 7 million. But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because America stands with you.”

Bush's speech also caused waves back in the U.S.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama angrily responded to what he contended  was an unfair swipe at him by Bush. In a not-so-veiled shot at Obama's stated willingness to negotiate with Iran, Bush mocked what he called "the false comfort of appeasement" and said:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.  We have heard this foolish delusion before."

White House officials denied the remark was directed at any one person, but Obama fired back within hours, accusing Bush of distorting his position and employing "the politics of fear."

—Ashraf Khalil in Jerusalem

Photo: George and Laura Bush. Credit: Agencia Brasil

IRAN: Bahais rounded up

Human rights advocates have decried the apparent arrests this week of six leaders of Iran's embattled Bahai community.

Rights groups say Fariba Kamalabadi, Jamaloddin Khanjani, Afif Naeimi, Saeid Rezaie, Behrouz Tavakkoli and Vahid Tizfahm were all unofficial leaders of Iran's outlawed but often tolerated Bahai religious minority who lived in Tehran.

They were arrested Wednesday, most likely on security charges, by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security and locked up Tehran's infamous Evin Prison, according to rights activists.

No one's sure why. Bahais are mostly apolitical. But Iran's clerical leadership considers them heretical. And they are informally barred from obtaining public-sector employment or university scholarships.

LEBANON: Qatar emerges as diplomatic powerhouse

Pity Amr Moussa.

For months the dour Arab League secretary-general shuttled between his Cairo home and the Lebanese capital in a futile attempt to get Lebanese factions to talk, only to walk away in abject failure.

Then along came a smiling Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, foreign minister and prime minister of Qatar.

In a space of hours, he appears to have done what neither Moussa nor French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner (who also spent many fruitless weeks trying to solve the Lebanese mess) have  been able to do: get these guys locked in a room together to hammer out some kind of agreement.

During the news conference announcing a new deal between fighting Lebanese factions, Sheik Hamad spoke gently but firmly to the whole country, as if they were adults who must take charge of their own country:

The Lebanese people will have to help us. As Lebanese, you have to accept that this is your wound. You will have to heal it. … All the Arabs are with you, but you have to exert your own efforts. You as Lebanese have to decide to end this crisis.

Sheik Hamad also said: “Everyone knows that there is no winner in this.”

Except for maybe the sheik himself, who emerged as a diplomatic rock star.

IRAQ: A day of sadness, in Spanish and English

Cpl. Miguel Angel Guzman was the last to be buried of the four Marines killed by a roadside bomb in Karma on May 2. He was laid to rest Wednesday at Rose Hills Memorial Park, south of Los Angeles.

Sgt. Glen Martinez was buried Tuesday in Monte Vista, Colo. Lance Cpl. James F. Kimple and Lance Cpl. Casey L. Casanova were buried Saturday in Carroll, Ohio, and Summit, Miss., respectively. The four were from the 1st Marine Logistics Group at Camp Pendleton.

Much of the funeral and burial service for Guzman, including the presentation of his Purple Heart to his parents, was in Spanish.

"Today is a day of much sadness; there is much pain in today's service," Father John-Paul Gonzales told several hundred family members, Marines and friends gathered at St. John of God Church in Norwalk.

—Tony Perry and Francisco Vara-Orta, in Norwalk and Whittier.

Photo: Marines fold flag atop Guzman's casket for presentation to his family. Credit: Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times.

IRAQ: Stories of life and death

During their regular visits to the far-flung U.S. military bases across Iraq, the generals commanding American forces here usually give handshakes, cigars and perhaps one of their personal collector's coins to a few soldiers chosen to be honored for special actions. Those being honored might have led a particularly perilous mission or returned to duty following a bad ambush.

Rarely do their stories capture much attention beyond that of the soldier being honored and the general doing the honoring, but Sgt. Justin Hollis' tale captivated the audience sitting inside a hut-like dwelling at McHenry, a dust-blown base in the battered little city of Hawija, about 110 miles north of Baghdad.

It was 3:30 a.m. on May 2, and a crescent moon was the only light guiding the U.S. military convoy rumbling through the northern Iraqi desert. The hulking vehicles known as MRAPs carrying the soldiers offered them protection from roadside bombs, RPGs and gunfire, but as Hollis learned, armor is no match for fast-rising water.

A tire of one MRAP caught on the edge of the road. The vehicle slid off the road and into a canal. The soldiers inside got out safely, but the gunner's hand was caught beneath the massive vehicle's machine gun, leaving his head a few inches above the water.

According to the account read aloud as Hollis stood silently in front of Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin III, the No. 2 commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Hollis jumped into the water and tried to free the gunner. But MRAPs, short for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, can weigh up to 80,000 pounds, and it's not easy to free someone caught in its layers of metal. The vehicle began sinking. The gunner was going down with it.

The situation looked hopeless, but Hollis grabbed a plastic tube from his first-aid kit and placed one end of it in the gunner's mouth just as he slipped beneath the water. The other end remained above the surface, allowing the gunner to breathe until a rescue unit arrived to free him.

The audience clapped loudly as Hollis, having shaken Austin's hand and received his thanks after Tuesday's ceremony, left the wooden hut and returned to his soldier's life.

Another story, told recently at a lunch hosted by Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, the commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, was just as compelling but had a different ending. Hammond told the story of Army Maj. Mark Rosenberg, whose job was to work alongside Iraqi soldiers facing militia fighters in the Baghdad hot zone of Sadr City.

As Hammond tells it, Rosenberg had been assigned to be the personal advisor to an Iraqi battalion commander in Sadr City. "He wouldn't let him fail," Hammond said of Rosenberg, describing how the major shadowed his Iraqi colleague and nudged him along when the situation seemed hopeless.

Rosenberg's job was to make sure the Iraqi unit stayed out front. But after nearly two days without sleep or food, the U.S. soldier knew it was time to give himself and his men a break. He drew away from the commander. It was April 8. As he drove away from the Iraqis, his vehicle hit a roadside bomb, killing Rosenberg.

"He had an innate ability to lead," Hammond said of Rosenberg, who was one of 52 U.S. troops killed last month and one of at least 4,077 to die since the war began in March 2003.

—Tina Susman in Baghdad

ISRAEL: Bush celebrates and says goodbye

President Bush arrived in Israel today to help celebrate the Jewish State's 60th anniversary and possibly help nudge along the (so far lackluster) Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations he launched last fall.

With Bush's time in office winding down, Israeli observers sound genuinely nostalgic to see him go, and some are already fretting about Israel's future with someone else in the White House.

An editorial in the Jerusalem Post this week declared: "Of all the US presidents over the past 60 years, it is hard to think of a better friend to Israel than George W. Bush."

He'll meet several times with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose own longevity in office is being questioned due to shaky popularity, a fragile coalition and an accelerating corruption investigation against him.  One Israeli columnist dubbed this "a meeting of the lame ducks."

Bush is likely to hear complaints from Palestinians that his schedule here reflects his administration's loyalties and sympathies. Bush has no plans to travel to the West Bank and will meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas later this week in Cairo, but not in Ramallah.

On the same day as Palestinians throughout Israel, the occupied West Bank and the besieged Hamas-run Gaza Strip will commemorate the 60th anniversary of "The Catastrophe," Bush will be addressing the Israeli Knesset. 

Bush is also likely to hear a lot in the coming days about pardoning convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Jay Pollard before he leaves office. The issue  is expected to be quietly brought up by Israeli officials, and pro-Pollard activist groups, as the picture below shows, are not-so-quietly doing the same.

In an interview with Israel's Channel 10 before leaving the U.S., Bush was diligently noncommittal when asked if he had received a formal request to pardon Pollard and whether he was considering it. 

BUSH:  We are constantly analyzing cases.  There's been no change in the government's   attitude at this point.    
Q: So?
BUSH: No change.   
Q: But your -- did you get such a request?
BUSH: Oh, yes, constantly.
Q: Constantly?
BUSH:  Sure.

Ashraf Khalil in Jerusalem

Photo: Ashraf Khalil

LEBANON: Dangerous times and encouraging signs

Scholar and Lebanon expert Augustus Richard Norton recently took time out for a lengthy e-mail interview with the Los Angeles Times about the confusing conflict in Lebanon.

Lebanon watchers have been worried for some time that the current political stalemate between the Western-leaning government and the Iranian-backed opposition could explode and plunge the country into civil war.

"While many Lebanese adults have a living memory of the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, many shabaab or 'young bloods' on all sides have been rearing for a fight," wrote Norton. "On several occasions dangerous clashes emerged and the country seems to have been close to the brink, and then wiser heads prevailed on all sides."

Norton knows Lebanon well. He served as a peacekeeper in the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) during the 1980s and wrote the groundbreaking book "Amal and the Shi'a" in 1987.

Now a professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University, he recently published the timely "Hezbollah: A Short History," described by Publisher's Weekly as a "remarkably thorough, articulate portrait" and by the Washington Post as a "lucid primer" on the group.

He's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and  was an advisor to the Iraq Study Group in 2006.

Below is the interview.

EGYPT: Cyberspace and beatings?

Their technology is beyond placards and clenched fists; their strategies are sketched out in cyberspace, they communicate in acronyms and SMS's. But Egypt’s bloggers and Facebook activists receive the same harsh treatment by police as the country’s less -technically savvy dissidents: interrogation rooms and alleged beatings.

Ahmed Maher has accused police of torturing him after he was arrested for using his Facebook network to rally support for a nationwide strike against low wages, inflation and the failures of President Hosni Mubarak’s 26-year-old regime. Maher told Human Rights Watch that he was blindfolded and handcuffed and taken to a police station on May 7.

He claims he was stripped to his underwear, kicked and beaten. He said a blow to his head damaged his hearing. Human Rights Watch reported that the ordeal lasted about 12 hours and that Maher, a civil engineer, was released by alleged assailants who “applied lotion to his back between beatings in an apparent attempt to reduce bruising.”

ISRAEL: Messianic campaign spreading the news to the Jews?

"5.4 million Jews live in Israel today -- more than in any period throughout history, but only 0.1% of them believe" in Jesus, says an internal memo of Israel's messianic communities announcing a campaign to spread the gospel throughout the country's Jewish residents. Anti-missionary circles say their "intelligence people" intercepted the "shocking memo" (Hebrew) that also expressed concern over legislators' support for a bill seeking to tighten restrictions on missionary activity, already outlawed in Israel.

Reportedly, a campaign equating Jesus with salvation came to an abrupt end after people complained of billboards on buses throughout the country reading "Jesus = Yeshua = Salvation" (the words are very similar in Hebrew, perhaps too close for some). An urgent appeal by Yad L'Achim to the national bus company bore quick results and the billboards were removed within hours, the company's advertising department stating it did not want to offend the Jewish public's feelings.

ISRAEL: Will Olmert survive?

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's troubles continue to lurch onward with no sign of a quick conclusion.
Investigators from the National Fraud Unit raided the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor on Tuesday searching for incriminating documents dated back to Olmert's time as minister.  On Monday, they raided Jerusalem's city  hall, where Olmert  served as mayor for 10  years.

The corruption investigation against Olmert centers around allegedly illicit cash payments from Jewish-American millionaire Morris Talansky, but investigators have also questioned two other wealthy Jewish-American businessmen.

Olmert has escaped several corruption investigations before this and never been formally charged. He managed to hang on in 2006 despite plummeting popularity over his government's handling of the conflict with Hizbollah. through it all he's cultivated a reputation as the ultimate teflon survivor.

But few seem to be betting on him this time. Recent polls indicate 60 percent of Israelis feel he should resign.

Columnist Sima Kadmon said the investigators appear to have a strong case and the allegations, which involve cash-stuffed envelopes, are particularly tawdry. 

"It appears that part of the shock in the political system and the media is not over the offense, but rather, over its lack of sophistication," Kadmon wrote.

—Ashraf Khalil  in Jerusalem

LEBANON: A hellish experience for journalists

By Raed Rafei in Beirut

Last week, I became a victim of the violence against the media that has been part and parcel of the recent fighting and unrest in Lebanon.

After taking a photograph of a dying man who was shot during a funeral, I was attacked by an angry mourner.

He was outraged because I was taking photos. I tried to explain that I was a reporter and that I was doing my job, but he grabbed a stick and got ready to hit me. I decided to stop resisting and hand him my camera.

Luckily, more cooler heads were around to calm him down and extricate me from the madness. One of them, Ali, took me by the hand and started running to a "safe place."

IRAQ: Tragedy strikes again for Marsh Arabs

Saddam Hussein’s regime killed Sabbar Uwaid’s wife and 10 other members of his family. But the aging tribal sheik says one of the greatest tragedies of his life was witnessing the destruction of the lush marshlands that had sustained his people for thousands of years.

For more than a decade, Hussein systematically drained the vast wetlands of southern Iraq in a bid to crush rebels who hid among the reeds. His forces bombed their villages and arrested and killed their families.

By the time U.S.-led forces invaded in 2003, barely 400 square miles remained of the marshes that once extended nearly 8,000 square miles across an area straddling the Iraq-Iran border. Uwaid’s tribe had depended on those marshes for centuries to graze buffalo, to fish and to grow rice. Without them, they were forced to uproot themselves.

Thousands of the region’s Marsh Arabs fled to refugee camps in Iran. Uwaid moved with about 300 other families to the sandy outskirts of the southern holy city of Najaf, where their dome-shaped reed homes and herds of buffalo make an incongruous sight.

“Here, we feel as if we are living outside Iraq,” Uwaid said. “We are used to the life of the marshes.... We still feel nostalgic for that life and we wish to return to it.”

Now the nightmare is repeating itself, Uwaid said. The people have been told that the land they are occupying sits atop an archaeological site and they will have to move. Southern Iraq is full of buried treasures, many of them dating to the dawn of civilization. But heritage officials are fighting a losing battle against antiquities smugglers and thieves (read more here).

Uwaid says his people would like nothing more than to return to the lush land at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which many scholars regard as the inspiration for the biblical Garden of Eden.

After Hussein was toppled, the Iraqi authorities began tearing down the dams that had diverted water from the wetlands, allowing parts to flood again. Some Marsh Arabs have returned to their old way of life, but Uwaid hesitates.

“It is not easy for us to return to our old place,” he said. “Land mines are planted there. The water is not covering most of the area yet. Nor are there rehabilitation projects yet to make the area suitable to be lived in.”

— Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf

Photo: Marsh Arabs water herds of buffalo on the sandy outskirts of the southern holy city of Najaf. Credit: Saad Fakhrildeen / Los Angeles Times

IRAQ: From war zone to courtroom

The Marines in Anbar province are no longer engaged in daily firefights. But courts-martial continue at Camp Pendleton arising from allegations of misconduct by Marines when combat was a daily occurrence.

* HAMANDIYA. Lawrence Hutchins (left), convicted as the ringleader in the killing of an unarmed Iraqi suspected of insurgent ties, is set soon to be transferred from the Camp Pendleton brig to the military prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.

Hutchins' sentence was reduced last week from 15 years to 11 years by Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland, commander of Marine Forces Central Command. Helland met with Hutchins' family and lawyer before making his decision.

A sergeant when the April 2006 killing occurred, Hutchins has been busted in rank and given a dishonorable discharge. The cases against six other Marines and a Navy corpsman involved in the incident are completed; none is currently behind bars.

* HADITHA. The court-martial of Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the squad leader whose troops killed 24 civilians in November 2005, has been delayed while his attorneys appeal evidentiary rulings by the military judge.

Attorneys for Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, accused of dereliction for not launching a war-crimes investigation into the killings, are awaiting a ruling on their assertion that Chessani is being made a "political scapegoat" by the Marine Corps in an attempt to appease "the anti-war press and their fellow politicians in Congress." Court-martial is tentatively set for June.

A pretrial hearing for 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson is underway. He is charged with hindering the investigation by ordering that pictures of the dead Iraqis be destroyed. Cases against other Marines have been completed; none is serving time.

* FALLOUJA. Two active-duty Marines and a former Marine await trial for allegedly killing prisoners during the battle for Fallouja in November 2004 rather than taking time to handle them according to the rules of war. The former Marine is set to be tried in federal court in Riverside in July.

In an interview this week with Marine Corps Times reporter Gidget Fuentes, former Marine Jose L. Nazario told of the trauma of being fired as a probationary police officer in Riverside when the charges were announced. He said he has lost 30 pounds and is battling depression.

“I’m a former sergeant of Marines, and I can’t even provide the basic necessities for my family,” he said. “It’s depressing.”

Tony Perry, in San Diego

Photo: Lawrence Hutchins, then a sergeant, leaving the courtroom at Camp Pendleton. Photo credit: Associated Press.            

EGYPT: Keep our gas away from Israel!

A number of opposition MPs and independent activists have recently launched a campaign to pressure President Hosni Mubarak’s regime to stop exporting natural gas to Israel. Under the Slogan “No to the Gas Setback”, the opposition gave the government an ultimatum of 30 days to go back on a deal that obliges Egypt to provide Israel with gas for 15 years.

Under the contract, Egypt is committed to pump 1.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year into Israel. For the opposition, the deal is another blow similar to the “1967 setback” under which Israeli forces occupied Egypt’s Sinai, among other Arab territories. If the government does not heed the opposition’s call, campaigners are threatening to take to the streets.

IRAN: Ahmadinejad loves to talk, but not to Bush

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today said he'd be delighted to meet with the president of the United States.

Just not with George W. Bush, whose term runs out in eight months.

"Except for the Zionist regime [i.e., Israel], we are ready to negotiate with any country,"  he told reporters in one of his infamous rambling news conferences today:

"Before I said I was ready to have a debate with President Bush. Now I say I am ready to hold a debate with the U.S. presidential candidate before large audiences of the world, because Bush is the outgoing president and no longer relevant."

The press-friendly president  of an increasingly press-unfriendly country also took on questions ranging from Iran's controversial nuclear program to the price of food in the capital.

IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN: U.S. casualties identified

The Defense Department identified two soldiers who died in Iraq and one who died in Afghanistan. At least 4,076 American military personnel have died in Iraq and 501 in Afghanistan.

Cpl. Jessica A. Ellis, 24, of Bend, Ore., was killed by a roadside bomb Sunday in Baghdad. She was assigned to the 2nd Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Ft. Campbell, Ky.

Spc. Joseph A. Ford, 23, of Knox, Ind., died Saturday in Al Asad, Iraq, of injuries suffered in a vehicle accident. He was assigned to the 1st Squadron, 152nd Cavalry Regiment, 76th Brigade Combat Team, Indiana National Guard, New Albany, Ind.

Pvt. Matthew W. Brown, 20, of Zelienople, Pa., died Sunday in Asadabad, Afghanistan, from injuries unrelated to combat. He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 321st Field Artillery Regiment, 18th Fires Brigade (Airborne), Ft. Bragg, N.C.

IRAQ: Vying for power

By Usama Redha in Baghdad

For many months, I heard that the Ministry of Electricity was planning to ration power in Baghdad by giving each family 10 amperes of electricity, or a bit more depending on how many people lived in a house. The idea was to attach a circuit breaker at the top of the electricity poles so people could not mess with their allotted share of amperes and there would be more to go around.

Finally, the electricity workers came to my neighborhood and began installing the breaker boxes. I was granted 16 amps, because I lived with my parents. I asked the engineer, who wore a blue uniform and carried a notebook, what would happen if we went over our 16-amp limit and the circuit breaker shut off our power. How would we reach the box to flip the switch back on?

He told me in such cases, you must visit the local maintenance unit and ask for someone to come out, climb the pole and fix the problem.

Not long afterward, I was awakened early in the morning by the sounds of many voices on the street outside. I dressed quickly and opened the door to take a look. I laughed at what I saw. My neighbor, Haider, had brought a long stick with a hook at one end and he was trying to reach the circuit breaker at the top of the power pole.

His power had cut off because he had forgotten to turn off his electric water heater and had used more than his share of amps. The stick wasn't long enough, so he found another one and somehow taped it to the first one. People had gathered round to watch and were encouraging him.