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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top U.S. military officer on Sunday described the situation in Afghanistan as deteriorating but said the new commander on the ground had not yet requested additional troops. "I think it is serious and it is deteriorating, and I've said that over the past couple of years, that the Taliban insurgency has gotten better, more sophisticated, in their tactics," said Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff

Media Blackout "Equal and exact justice to all men..." --Thomas Jefferson Editor's Note: PG suggested -- this essay contains graphic descriptions of a brutal crime. In 1775, John Adams wrote, "There is in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong, a love of truth and a veneration of virtue ... if the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice..." Adams understood that a shared penchant for justice and virtue is essential to liberty, and depends upon the ability of people to discern between right...

WASHINGTON - The government believes Fidel Castro's health is deteriorating and that the Cuban dictator is unlikely to live through 2007. That dire view was reinforced last week when Cuba's foreign minister backed away from his prediction the ailing Castro would return to power by early December. "It's a subject on which I don't want to speculate," Felipe Perez Roque told The Associated Press in Havana. U.S. government officials say there is still some mystery about Castro's diagnosis, his treatment and how he is responding. But these officials believe the 80-year-old leader has cancer of the stomach, colon or pancreas....

They learn it in school. And it is obscene. How they get away with it, I don’t know, but you see this obnoxious and obscene behavior everywhere. It is what you see on the news everyday of our courts out of control—of our judges gone wild. Wild in the sense that they believe they are not restricted or controlled by the constitutions of our federal or state government, the laws enacted by those governments, or the traditions of the judiciary developed pursuant to the constitutions and the principles of this country. These judges gone wild need to read Montesquieu, and...

A classified cable sent by the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Baghdad has warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon, according to government officials. The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in briefings presented by a senior C.I.A. official who recently visited Iraq. The officials described the two assessments as having been "mixed," saying that they did describe Iraq as having made important...