Here's the link to Wednesday's live blog.

5:26 pm PDT: We couldn't leave for the day without first reporting on this development.

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The United Nations will host a Haiti donors' conference at the end of March.

This conference will be quite different from last year's event, of course, coming as it does on the heels of the worst earthquake to strike Haiti in two centuries. An agenda has already begun to take shape: It's already clear that a future Haiti must be populated with environmentally sustainable, earthquake-resistant buildings, for example, and it's also clear that the international community must do something to ease Haiti's massive debt burden.

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Health care reform is necessary, and House Democrats should vote for it because it's best for the nation.

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New data released Friday shows that the story for the government’s foreclosure prevention program remains the same: Mortgage servicers have delivered relatively few permanent modifications, and hundreds of thousands of borrowers in trial modifications have yet to receive a final answer after many months of waiting.

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[This essay appears in the March 2010 issue of Lapham's Quarterly and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists that the public option is dead, but progressive organizations are mounting an aggressive campaign to resurrect it as Democratic lawmakers gear up to pass a final health care bill this week via a budgetary process known as reconciliation.

Democracy for America, Credo Action, and the Progressive Campaign Change Committee (PCCC) raised $75,000 for a 60-second spot that will air on MSNBC, CNN and a local station in Pelosi's home district of San Francisco.

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Washington - The struggle within the Barack Obama administration over Afghanistan policy entered a new phase when the president suggested at a meeting of his "war cabinet" Friday that it might be time to start negotiations with the Taliban, according to a report in the New York Times Saturday.

Obama said that the success of the recent operation to take control of the "insurgent stronghold" of Marja, combined with the killing of insurgent leaders in Pakistan by drone attacks, might be sufficient to "justify an effort to begin talks with the Taliban", two participants in the meeting told the Times.

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In an ABC television interview on February 14, 2010, former Vice President Dick Cheney mounted a vigorous attack on the Obama administration's departure from its predecessor's embrace of torture as an instrument in the arsenal of the "war on terror." Cheney's defense of the use of torture was articulated in terms of challenging the possible prosecution by the Obama administration of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives who had engaged in torture, and opposing any effort to disbar lawyers who had been asked by the Bush administration to provide legal justifications for the use of torture after the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11. According to Cheney:

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Changes to the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act currently working its way through the Senate would cover up intelligence failures and civil liberties abuses in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) by repealing existing protections for FBI whistleblowers and strengthening the state secrets privilege.

The bill is currently being "hotlined" through the Senate, which entails both the Senate majority leader and minority leader agreeing to pass the legislation by unanimous consent without a roll-call vote. This practice is usually used to pass uncontroversial bills and simple procedural motions, but opponents fear it is being used to push through this measure with little or no public debate.

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In the introduction to your book, you declare that you wrote it in order to "fight the symmetrical caricatures" often heard about Arab attitudes to the Holocaust? What are these caricatures?

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Washington - The Mexican government pledged Sunday to investigate the brutal killings of a U.S. consulate employee and two family members of consulate employees in violent, drug-plagued Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.

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We spend the hour with world-renowned linguist and dissident, Noam Chomsky. In a wide-ranging public conversation at the Harvard Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Chomsky talks about President Obama’s foreign and national security policies, the lessons of Vietnam, and his own activism. “You just can’t become involved part-time in these things,” Chomsky says. “It’s either serious and you’re seriously involved, or you go to a demonstration and go home and forget about it and go back to work, and nothing happens. Things only happen by really dedicated, diligent work.” [includes rush transcript]

• White House Predicts Passage of Healthcare Bill
• Ambassador: US-Israeli Relations Face Worst Crisis in 35 Years
• Report: Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants
• 35 Die in Kandahar Bombings
• 3 with Ties to US Consulate Killed in Mexico
• FCC to Unveil High-Speed Internet Plan
• Unemployment Rate for Young Veterans Reaches 21.1 Percent
• Wife of Justice Clarence Thomas Creates Tea Party-Linked Lobbying Group
• Texas Conservatives Approve Changes to School Curriculum
• Fed Panel: NY Discriminated Against Arab Principal
• Study Finds Link Between Childhood Obesity and School Lunch
• Air Force Sergeant Discharged After Being Outed by Local Police

For five years, Joyce and John Good silently tolerated angry partisan e-mails forwarded by family and friends.

They even ignored the steady vitriol flowing from the husband and wife they'd known for 40 years.

"We'd raised our children together," Joyce said of the couple. "We never talked politics. We'd just say, 'We're bipartisan.' But they started sending us these awful e-mails, and it was clear they assumed we agreed with them."

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Rule No. 1 in hip-hop: don't knock the hustle. And KRS-One stated clearly in the first principle of The Hip-Hop Declaration of Peace, that among the nine elements fundamental to the kulture is street entrepreneurialism. It is hard, I understand, to speak ill of a rapper or MC making business moves to better their living and, in some cases, enrich the communities from which they emerged.

And Jay-Z laid the statutes down a decade and half ago: "Let's get

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Jerusalem - Israeli leaders would like nothing better than to smash Iran’s putative nuclear capability with a swift bombing raid. Trouble is, most Israeli military and political chiefs are doubtful it could be done and fear the broader consequences of any attempt.

That might make for uncomfortable times down the road for Israel when it comes in the range of Iranian nukes. But it also could lead to domestic political conflict over the peace talks with the Palestinians, which U.S. mediators announced this week will restart in the coming days.

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Women have been stymied for years in efforts to achieve U.S. ratification of CEDAW, the UN treaty to eliminate discrimination against women. Now, meeting at the UN, U.S. women hope to regain influence in establishing rights for women around the world.

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Washington - The debate between those who favour investment in AIDS treatment and those who favour investment in its prevention came to the forefront Thursday at a U.S House of Representatives hearing on U.S. investments in HIV/AIDS in Africa.

International health organisations working to help check the spread of AIDS in Africa said meagre increases in funds from the U.S. government this year would be a step backwards. Some experts also emphasised that prevention must get appropriate attention in any fight against the disease.

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What a shame that the one movie about the Iraq war that has a chance of being viewed by a large worldwide audience should be so disappointing.

According to press reports, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally found a movie about the Iraq war they liked because it is "apolitical." Actually, "The Hurt Locker" is just the opposite -- it's an endorsement of the politically chauvinistic view that the world is a stage upon which Americans get to deal with their demons no matter the consequence for others.

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The lights must dim around Google's data-storage centers every time someone does a search for "government bureaucrat coming between you and your doctor." Foes of the Democrats' health-reform proposals have been chanting this on the hour for a year -- with a surge after Democrats put money for "comparative effectiveness research" in the stimulus bill.

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