News stories by William Fisher, page 4

Iraq and Afghanistan rank near rock-bottom in an index of corruption in 178 countries that found that nearly three- quarters of the countries surveyed showed serious corruption problems.

With tongue in cheek, constitutional experts congratulated the U.S. government Tuesday for negotiating a plea deal with Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr, thus avoiding a trial in the military commission 'puppet theatre' of a defendant who was just 15 at the time of his offences.

Two revelations await the reader of the Wikileaks section dealing with civilian deaths in the Iraq War: Iraqis are responsible for most of these deaths, and the number of total civilian casualties is substantially higher than has been previously reported.

The publication of a motherlode of secret field reports from the Iraq War are shining a bright light on heretofore unknown or underreported suspicions about the power of private security contractors and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by their fellow Iraqis, often with their U.S. military counterparts 'turning a blind eye'.

Asserting that 'the majority of Tea Party supporters are sincere, principled people of good will', the head of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) and other U.S. civil rights leaders are calling on the populist political grouping to purge itself of known racists lest they influence the direction of the movement.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear former Attorney General John Ashcroft's appeal of a lower court decision, which ruled that he could be held responsible for the wrongful detention of a U.S. citizen.

A U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican descent with mental disabilities is suing the U.S. government for wrongfully deporting him to Mexico and forcing him to endure over four months of living on the streets and in the shelters and prisons of Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

Failures in vetting, training and supervising Defence Department private security contractors are putting U.S. and coalition troops as well as Afghan civilians at risk and unwittingly aiding Afghan militants by hiring security contractors provided by the Taliban and by warlords, warns a new report released last week by the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee.

As two Democratic senators introduced yet another version of immigration reform legislation - and two Republican senators immediately condemned it - more than 500 not-for-profit organisations called on President Barack Obama to end what they called 'the merger of immigration enforcement with criminal justice.'

Election-year interparty political wrangling is threatening to again sabotage congressional efforts to provide medical help for tens of thousands of firefighters and other first responders whose health was damaged by the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Centre.