German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will not be spending his vacation in Italy, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has said that he "feels sorry for him." The dramatic tension in Italian-German relations began when a German parliamentarian ruminated on whether recent changes in Italian law would make it easier for Berlusconi to avoid p

Two interesting things did not happen in Iran today, July 9. Massive student demonstrations did not occur, and talks between Iran and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei over Iran's nuclear program did not collapse.

U.S. President George W. Bush visited Senegal and announced that slavery was a "crime of history." That announcement coincided with inaction in Liberia, where its president, Charles Taylor, continues to refuse to leave and an advance U.S. military team was turned away from a place called Iron Gate. The team peacefully returned to the U.S.

The CIA confirmed July 7 that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is alive. The CIA conclusion was based on a tape Al-Jazeera aired July 4 in which Hussein claimed to be alive and vowed to continue attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.

The 227th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence passed as so many before it, with wars and rumors of war.

The change of command at CENTCOM is scheduled for July 7, the U.S. Department of Defense announced today. That answers the question we posed on June 26, when we wrote, "Since our view is that Iraq is now in crisis and that the crisis is intensifying, it follows that an accelerated change of command is in order.

Six U.S. soldiers were wounded in Iraq on Tuesday, July 1. Three were hurt in a bomb explosion, while the other three were wounded in two separate grenade attacks. In another incident, a mosque blew up in Al Fallujah, which has been the scene of significant guerrilla attacks on U.S. troops.

A cease-fire between the Palestinians and Israelis has arrived, punctuated in Israel by a foreign worker's death in what appeared to be an attack by a rogue element of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade -- with the term "appeared" highlighted and underlined. The fundamental question is: Now what? The cease-fire has three months to go.

Israeli and Palestinian groups have agreed to a cease-fire. The visit of U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice finally brought the complex negotiations among the Palestinians to a close. The major negotiations that were under way were not between the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and Israel but between the PNA and Hamas.

Combat in Iraq intensified over the past 48 hours as guerrillas launched a series of attacks against U.S. forces. The focus of the guerrillas is now on U.S. forces moving in convoys. The road to the airport in Baghdad has become a repeated target, while grenades being dropped from overpasses also have become more widely used.