Iraq War

Syria has long had a diverse population that managed to live together in relative harmony. And the struggle to end Baathist rule drew together citizens from across class, economic, religious and ethnic lines. But now, in the fog of war, a growing sectarianism suggests that a stable Syria after President Bashar Assad's eventual ouster may prove to be elusive. Unfortunately, some at the forefront of the 17-month-long conflict are no longer championing inclusiveness as they did when the uprising began.

John Keegan, a British military historian whose critically acclaimed books spanned ancient and modern warfare and included the bestselling "The Face of Battle," has died. He was 78. Keegan died Thursday at his home in Kilmington, England, according to the London Daily Telegraph, where he had been military affairs editor. No cause of death was reported. A former senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, Keegan left teaching after a quarter of a century to join the Telegraph in 1986.

WASHINGTON - An Iraq war veteran has come to the aid of his former boss, Rep. Allen West, to tell how the Florida congressman handed over his body armor on the way to combat in Iraq, an act that might have saved the soldier's life. In a campaign spot that will air on Florida television during the Olympics, Sgt. Robert Delgado (Ret.) says he worried when he was deployed to Iraq that he might not make it home to see his new child - his wife was eight months' pregnant at the time. “I'm going to make sure you come home to your wife and your newborn baby,” Delgado recalls West saying to him. West, who was Delgado's commander at the time, handed his body armor to the soldier.

At 34, playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes has a lot going for her: this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama, a piece of a Tony Award-winning musical ("In the Heights") and a growing repute as one of the most poetic, socially clued-in young voices in the American theater. Now what she really could use is a little West Coast love. The off-Broadway Second Stage theater company just announced that it will produce Hudes' Pulitzer-winning "Water by the Spoonful," which premiered in October at Hartford Stage.

WASHINGTON-- Paying tribute to dead soldiers and their families, President Obama said Monday that the nation had reached a "milestone” of relative peace, noting the end of the Iraq war and plans to end America's role in the Afghan war. “After a decade under a dark cloud of war we can see the light of a new day on the horizon,” Obama told a crowd of military families gathered at Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate Memorial Day. ...

A Riverside County jury convicted a parolee Friday of first-degree murder for shooting a Riverside police officer in 2010, a brutal slaying that occurred after the officer pleaded with the killer. Earl Ellis Green, 46, faces a possible death sentence for the murder of Officer Ryan Bonaminio, an Iraq War veteran who had been on the force for four years. The jury deliberated for about three hours before returning with the guilty verdict with special circumstances that would make Green subject to execution.

In a short video produced by LA Louver in advance of Ben Jackel's solo show, one encounters the artist taking an ax, quite literally, to one of his sculptures. He's chipping away at a block of Douglas fir to form an enormous replica of the head of a pole-mounted weapon called a halberd, in a style traditionally carried by the personal guards of the elders of Saxony around the year 1600 - as he quickly clarifies when I mistakenly call it a spearhead. The piece, which, at 131/2 feet tall, would clearly do damage if it fell on you, is titled "Pay Attention.

The Drowned Cities A novel Paolo Bacigalupi Little, Brown., 439 pp.: $17.99, ages 14 and up Whether it's a conscious or subliminal reaction to U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, war is an increasingly common theme in modern young adult literature. But its horrors are rarely so thoroughly detailed as in Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Drowned Cities. " One of the more graphically violent young adult titles of late, "The Drowned Cities" reads like a dystopian mash-up of the Vietnam War and modern geopolitics, where survivalism battles personal loyalties in a brutal and chaotic world.