WAR

Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, President Obama's choice to represent his administration before the Supreme Court, told a key Republican senator Tuesday that she believed the government could hold suspected terrorists without trial as war prisoners. She echoed comments by Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. during his confirmation hearing last month.

He lives with his wife in a trailer east of town, beside a heavily traveled two-lane highway that carries families of fallen soldiers to the national military cemeteries in Grafton. It was a perfect spot, David Stevens decided, to build a monument to American soldiers -- the sort of expression of gratitude he might have appreciated 40 years ago when he came home from Vietnam.

Night after night, hour after hour, Hussein Ali Mohammed sits alone in the medical clinic that employs him as a guard. It is not the job the 26-year-old envisioned when he earned his teaching degree, but it's the best he can do for now in a country teeming with educated, ambitious people -- but sorely lacking in suitable jobs that pay living wages. Years of political turmoil, U.S.-imposed sanctions and war have devastated Iraq's workforce.

In times of war, they have proved safer than radios, more nimble than humans, more fuel-efficient than aircraft. Depending on the price of birdseed. Their exploits, though, have tended to go underappreciated here in London, where Mayor Ken Livingstone's long-running war with the lowly pigeon over who controls the territory of Trafalgar Square has tended to obscure the otherwise heroic stature of the ubiquitous waddlers. No more.

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said Saturday that his guerrilla organization had the remains of Israeli soldiers left on southern Lebanon's battlefields during a 34-day war that started after the group captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. "Oh Zionists, your army is lying to you. . . . Your army has left the body parts of your soldiers in our villages and fields," Nasrallah said in a rare public appearance. "I am not talking about regular body parts.

As he prepares to leave Iraq after a year as the top Marine, Maj. Gen. Walter E. Gaskin is upbeat about the future of Anbar province but candid about U.S. mistakes made in the early years of the war that allowed the insurgency to grow. U.S. officials created a "perfect storm" after the March 2003 invasion that allowed the insurgency to attract recruits, Gaskin said in interviews here this week.

To a crescendo of clicking cameras, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stepped before a row of shimmering U.S. flags last March to make an announcement Americans had been waiting four months to hear. November's elections had swept Democrats into power on a wave of frustration with the Iraq war. Now, flanked by three committee chairmen in her ceremonial Capitol office, the San Francisco congresswoman prepared to unveil the party's plan to bring the troops home.

In a rare internal critique of Israel's use of cluster bombs, a government-appointed commission has found a lack of "operational discipline, control and oversight" in the army's deployment of the weapons in civilian areas. The panel's statement, buried in an exhaustive report on Israel's conduct of the 2006 Lebanon war, did not directly challenge the army's assertion that its use of cluster bombs in that conflict fell within the bounds of international humanitarian law.

A Southern California human rights activist trapped in an African hotel room in the midst of a gunfight between soldiers and rebels crawls across the carpet, feels something hot under his fingers and flinches. "I touched a bullet," he says, voice and hands shaking. Gabriel Stauring, 41, posted the video footage on his website last week after traveling to the Central African country of Chad to document Darfur refugees for his Redondo Beach-based group, Stop Genocide Now.

In an airy studio lined with mirrors, little girls in pink leotards and boys in black shorts and white T-shirts pull themselves up as straight as they can and push their toes out into first position. Their teacher, Ghada Taiyi, walks between them, straightening a pair of knobby knees and adjusting the curve of an arm. She switches on a cassette player, and the strains of a grand piano fill the room. "You wouldn't think we are in Iraq," she says with a smile.