The assassination of Benazir Bhutto threatens to plunge a nuclear armed Pakistan into civil war, opposition groups warned today.

The former prime minister was killed by a suicide bomber as she left a public rally in the city of Rawalpindi today.

Commentators said the killing would make the postponement of the upcoming elections almost certain and could spark further unrest.

When one military wife got the news that her husband was coming home from Iraq, they didn't tell her he was going to bring the war back with him.

Parents, teachers and doctors contacted by the Guardian over the past three months cite a litany of distress signals sent out by young people in their care - from nightmares and bedwetting to withdrawal, muteness, panic attacks and violence towards other children, sometimes even to their own parents.

Artists are forever debating war. Obviously it helps if, to support their views, they have art like these digital montages from the Russian group AES F. The name comes from the initials of its members' surnames: Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovitch, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes. The series, entitled Last Riot, features images of war-crazed child models imposed onto landscapes. AES F explain: "All are fighting against all and against themselves, no difference exists any more between victim and aggressor, male and female. This world celebrates the end of ideology, history and ethic." Hmmm.

It was disturbing to watch the horrible manner young girls were killed for their body parts, to aid rituals. The rebels believed that their body parts, especially their genitals made the best charm that provided supernatural power for the exploit. Girls' genitals were removed, while they were still alive. And my heart pounded in disgust, as these demon-style executions were carried out in the most atrocious way.

From "Harvest of Hate: Stories and Essays 'Fuel for the Soul'" (PublishAmerica, 2006) by Roland Bankole Marke.

From the page:

-- From this war nothing good will come--not for Israel , not for Lebanon and not for Palestine . The "New Middle East" that will be its result will be a worse place to live in. --

From the page:

-- The Israeli military is using chemical weapons during its bombing of Lebanon, a Belgian-Lebanese professor claimed during a press conference in Brussels on Thursday. --

-- Joseph Galloway recently retired from Knight Ridder newspapers where he was a senior military correspondent. He is also co-author of We Were Soldiers Once... and Young. --

Interview with Joseph Galloway

-- Our culture fixates on the sixties and early seventies. It's our fetish, our tic, like a thrilling and doomed love affair we can't quite get over. (Thus we have another much-anticipated Truman Capote biopic coming out this fall.) And so when it comes to thinking about Iraq, the Vietnam template inevitably hovers: Media memories of Saigon flicker like pentimento ghost images behind the dispatches and videos from Baghdad. IEDs are the new claymore mines, and the battle for Fallujah was the battle for Hue redux. A Google search for Iraq and quagmire results in several million returns—more than twice as many as Vietnam and quagmire.

Yet during the first couple of years of the war, respectable opinion considered any suggestions of real equivalency outré—glib and sloppy and, even more, tendentious: Because Vietnam is the shorthand for slow, mortifying national debacle, even mentioning parallels seemed defeatist. Tom Friedman brought up Vietnam analogies five times in his Times columns during the first two years of the Iraq war, always to dismiss the very idea—"this notion being peddled by Europeans, the Arab press and the antiwar left."

But he hasn't mentioned it at all for the past sixteen months. And since then, Chuck Hagel—not an Arab journalist or antiwar leftist but a Republican senator from Nebraska and a Vietnam veteran—pretty much single-handedly opened the Establishment closet and dragged the V-word out. "We are locked into a bogged-down problem not un-similar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam," he said. "The longer we stay there, the more similarities are going to come together." --

-- A new memorial dedicated May 8 -- the 61st anniversary of VE (Victory in Europe) Day – outside Washington honors those who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, a brutal campaign in the final winter of World War II.

The governments of Belgium and Luxembourg contributed $80,000 to build the new memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, the historic burial ground of U.S. military heroes visited by 4 million people each year. The cemetery lies in Arlington, Virginia, overlooking the Potomac River and the city of Washington.

About 500 military veterans and their families attended the dedication ceremony along with dignitaries from the U.S. government and from the governments of Belgium and Luxembourg, which had been under Nazi control before being liberated by the Allies in World War II. Attendees included Belgium's prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, and Luxembourg's secretary of state, Octavie Modert. --