The New People’s Army has been fighting for a communist state in Philippines since 1968 in a campaign that has cost more than 40,000 lives.
In the first of two special reports from the island of Luzon, Al Jazeera’s Marga Ortigas finds out why the fighting has been going on for so long.
Al Jazeera’s Inside Story looks at allegations that Israel used drones to conduct attacks in Gaza in last year’s offensive against Hamas.
On Tuesday, American forces pulled out of Iraqi cities and towns and redeployed to military bases, in compliance with a security agreement made with the government. Withdrawal from the country is scheduled for 2011.
The day has been declared an official holiday in Iraq — National Sovereignty Day.
Even as parades celebrated the milestone, a deadly attack took place in the northern city of Kirkuk, where at least 27 people were killed. This is the latest in a string of attacks that have taken place over the last week, threatening the country’s security.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and one of the authors of the Iraq Index, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the withdrawal and it may mean for the future of Iraq.
Mid-term elections in Argentina have dealt a severe blow to the political fortunes of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her husband Nestor Kirchner, the former President. In a humiliating defeat for Argentina’s first couple, her powerful husband and predecessor, former President Néstor Kirchner, was upset in a high-profile congressional race in Buenos Aires province. Furthermore, the Kirchner wing of the dominant Peronist Party lost its majority in the Argentine Congress.
More from the New York Times:
Néstor Kirchner, the former president of Argentina, resigned his post as leader of the Peronist Party on Monday, a day after he and his supporters suffered a crushing defeat in national congressional elections.
The resignation was a stunning admission of defeat for a combative and often stubborn politician who is widely viewed to be deeply involved in running the government led by his wife, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Combined with their loss of both houses of Congress, Mr. Kirchner’s defeat appears to have dashed any dreams the couple had of extending their political dynasty, and put Argentina’s presidency up for grabs in the 2011 elections.
Analysts said the results of the election on Sunday would restore some balance to Argentine politics and could increase the country’s credibility with foreign investors.
But they also leave Argentina facing continued uncertainty and potential political instability. The opposition remains fractured and the Kirchners will maintain control of Congress until December.
Argentina is also facing a struggle to make payments on billions of dollars in foreign debt, economists said. “There is this impending struggle for the Argentine government to make any of its payments and meet its populist promises, while at the same time ensuring the economy can grow,” said Karen Hooper, a Latin American analyst for Stratfor, a Texas-based global intelligence company.
The election became a referendum on the couple’s leadership. Mr. Kirchner ran for the lower house of Congress in a bid to resuscitate the flagging administration of his wife, who has struggled to muster more than a 30 percent approval rating in opinion polls since taking over in December 2007.
But Mr. Kirchner’s gamble to run in Buenos Aires Province, the country’s most populated, backfired when he narrowly lost a high-profile race against a millionaire businessman, Francisco de Narváez, a congressman from a rival faction within the Kirchners’ Peronist Party.
In the end, not only were the Kirchners swept in the major provinces of Buenos Aires, Cordoba and Mendoza, but they even lost in Mr. Kirchner’s home state, Santa Cruz. Nationally, they won just 29.6 percent of the vote, less than most analysts had predicted.
“Néstor Kirchner just died politically,” said Elisa Carrió, a longtime opposition leader who ran against Mrs. Kirchner for president in 2007.
Inside Story looks at the recent military deal struck between Moscow and Tel Aviv.
The United States’ top commander in Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, is warning against the withdrawal of US troops.
Colonel Gary Volkesky told Al Jazeera that a pullout could give fighters more opportunities to carry out attacks.
But American troops remain scheduled to leave major Iraqi cities and towns on Tuesday. Al Jazeera’s Mike Kirsch reports from Mosul.
Inside Story looks at the impact of Iraq’s Oil Law as the country prepares for the first oil auction.
Ilan Mizrahi has spent 16 years photographing and filming right wing Israeli settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron. His film, Israel: Rise of the Right, looks at the followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane, an American-born rabbi and politician who proposed the mass expulsion of Arabs from Israel before he was assassinated in 1990.
Christopher Sabatini of the Council of the Americas on the developments in Honduras.
The leftist President of Honduras, José Manuel Zelaya, was ousted and sent into exile by the Honduran military acting on court order. President Zelaya had immersed Honduras into a constitutional crisis by seeking to hold an non-binding constitutional referendum in an illegal attempt to amend the Honduran Constitution.
More from New York Times:
President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was ousted by the army on Sunday, capping months of tensions over his efforts to lift presidential term limits.
In the first military coup in Central America since the end of the cold war, soldiers stormed the presidential palace in the capital, Tegucigalpa, early in the morning, disarming the presidential guard, waking Mr. Zelaya and putting him on a plane to Costa Rica.
Mr. Zelaya, a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, angrily denounced the coup as illegal. “I am the president of Honduras,” he insisted at the airport in San José, Costa Rica, still wearing his pajamas.
Later Sunday the Honduran Congress voted him out of office, replacing him with the president of Congress, Roberto Micheletti.
The military offered no public explanation for its actions, but the Supreme Court issued a statement saying that the military had acted to defend the law against “those who had publicly spoken out and acted against the Constitution’s provisions.”
Leaders across the hemisphere, however, denounced the coup, which American officials on Sunday said they had been working for several days to avert.
President Obama said he was deeply concerned and in a statement called on Honduran officials “to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic charter.
“Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference,” he said. His quick condemnation offered a sharp contrast with the actions of the Bush administration, which in 2002 offered a rapid, tacit endorsement of a short-lived coup against Mr. Chávez.
The Organization of American States issued a statement calling for Mr. Zelaya’s return and said it would not recognize any other government. The organization’s secretary general, José Miguel Insulza, called an emergency meeting of the group to weigh further actions. The arrest of Mr. Zelaya was the culmination of a battle that had been simmering for weeks over a referendum, which was to have taken place Sunday, that he hoped would lead to a revision of the Constitution. Critics said it was part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the Constitution’s limit of a single four-year term for the president.
Early this month, the Supreme Court agreed, declaring the referendum unconstitutional, and Congress followed suit last week. In the last few weeks, supporters and opponents of the president have held competing demonstrations, and on Thursday, the president himself led a group of protesters to an Air Force base and seized the ballots, which the prosecutor’s office and the electoral tribunal had ordered confiscated.
Mr. Zelaya then fired the armed forces commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez. The Supreme Court ruled the firing illegal and reinstated General Vásquez.
As the crisis escalated, American officials began in the last few days to talk with Honduran government and military officials in an effort to head off a possible coup. A senior administration official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, said the military broke off those discussions on Sunday.
The two nations have long had a close military relationship, with an American military task force stationed at a Honduran air base about 50 miles northwest of Tegucigalpa. The unit focuses on training Honduran military forces, counternarcotics operations, search and rescue, and disaster relief missions throughout Central America.
In Costa Rica, Mr. Zelaya told the Venezuelan channel Telesur that he had been awoken by gunshots. Masked soldiers took his cellphone, shoved him into a van and took him to an air force base, where he was put on a plane. He said he did not know that he was being taken to Costa Rica until he landed at the airport in San José.
“They are creating a monster they will not be able to contain,” he told a local television station in San José. “A usurper government, that emerges by force, cannot be accepted, will not be accepted by any country.”