Summaries here and here and here and here and here.

Grim statistics.

The number of US soldiers wounded in Iraq hit its highest level in two years last month, as 776 members of the military were wounded in action, US media reported Sunday.

The number of wounded in September was the highest since the battle for control of Fallujah in November 2004, the Washington Post reported in a story based on Department of Defence data.

Last month’s casualties were also the fourth highest since the US- led invasion of in March 2003.

An additional 300 troops were wounded in the first week of October…. Article

Related:

̾While much media reporting has focused on the number of dead, military experts say the number of wounded is a more accurate gauge of the fierceness of fighting because advances in armor and medical care allow many service members to survive who would have perished in past wars. The ratio of wounded to killed among U.S. forces in Iraq is about 8 to 1, compared with 3 to 1 in Vietnam. Article

Sorrowful, but smacks of more of a one-time incident than a tactical shift.

Hundreds of Iraqi policemen fell sick from poisoning Sunday at a base in southern Iraq after the evening meal breaking their daily Ramadan fast, and officials said they were investigating whether the poisoning was intentional.

An official with the Environment Ministry said 11 policemen had died. However, the governor of Wasit province where the poisoning took place denied any deaths, though he said some of the victims were in critical condition. There was no immediate explanation for the contradictory reports.

Some of the policemen began bleeding from the ears and nose after the meal, said Jassim al-Atwan, an inspector for the Environment Ministry, who was serving as a liaison in the investigation between the Health Ministry and the base, located in the town of Numaniyah.

[snip]

Some of the soldiers collapsed as soon as they stood up from them meal, others fell “one after the other” as they headed out to the yard in the base to line up in formation, al-Atwan said. Article

Hmm.

The U.S. military has reported the continued flow of Saudi fighters into Iraq.

Officials said the military has detected the flow of Saudi nationals into Iraq to fight the coalition and Shi’ites. They said the Saudis were recruited by Al Qaida to become suicide bombers and other attackers.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq, told a Sept. 29 briefing that 50 to 70 foreign fighters enter Iraq every month. Caldwell did not break down the influx of Al Qaida operatives. Article

Chaos abides.

…the creeping violence in the north — a region U.S. officials had hoped was getting more stable — underlines the difficulty in keeping all of Iraq’s potential hotspots under control at once.

It also suggests growing strains in another of Iraq’s sectarian divides. Baghdad has been suffering from violence between Sunni and Shiite death squads. In the north, the tensions are between Arabs and Kurds, who claim Kirkuk as part of their autonomous zone of Kurdistan to the north.

The violence also has begun to take on the grisly nature of Baghdad’s sectarian killings: In recent months, authorities in Kirkuk and Mosul have found bodies dumped in the city, their hands bound with signs they were tortured before their deaths. Article

Just thought it should be noted.

One hundred and thirty-four soldiers are expected to leave for Iraq next month.

Army spokesman Major Neumi Leweni said the contingent would be part of the rotation group to Baghdad. Article

The toll ticks up.

Twenty-one Lebanese have been killed and more than 100 wounded by unexploded Israeli bombs and bomblets dropped during the Jewish state’s offensive, the United Nations and police said Sunday.

As of October 3, 124 people had been killed or wounded by unexploded bombs, mostly submunitions that landed indiscriminately in civilian areas, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said. Article

What’s up. #1 — #2

Yuppers and double yuppers.

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.…

[snip]

…If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them. Article

First of a four-part series, covering the creeping selective federally-funded proselytizing.

The herders of this remote mountain village know little about America, but have learned from those who run a US-funded aid program about the American God.

A Christian God.

The US government has given $10.9 million to Food for the Hungry, a faith-based development organization, to reach deep into the arid mountains of northern Kenya to provide training in hygiene, childhood illnesses, and clean water. The group has brought all that, and something else that increasingly accompanies US-funded aid programs: r egular church service and prayer.

President Bush has almost doubled the percentage of US foreign-aid dollars going to faith-based groups such as Food for the Hungry, according to a Globe survey of government data. And in seeking to help such groups obtain more contracts, Bush has systematically eliminated or weakened rules designed to enforce the separation of church and state.

In Lakartinya, a simple hut built with funds from the US government is the first in the area to have a tin roof. It serves as a station for weighing babies, distributing food, teaching health classes — and, until recently, initiating local people into the rites of Christianity, according to Food for the Hungry staff. Classes begin and end with prayers, and in some cases are followed by Christian services.

For decades, US policy has sought to avoid intermingling government programs and religious proselytizing. The aim is both to abide by the Constitution’s prohibition against a state religion and to ensure that aid recipients don’t forgo assistance because they don’t share the religion of the provider.

Since medical programs are aimed at the most serious illnesses — AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis — the decision whether to seek treatment can determine life or death.

But many of those restrictions were removed by Bush in a little-noticed series of executive orders — a policy change that cleared the way for religious groups to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in additional government funding. It also helped change the message American aid workers bring to many corners of the world, from emphasizing religious neutrality to touting the healing powers of the Christian God.

Bush’s orders altered the longstanding practice that groups preach religion in one space and run government programs in another. The administration said religious organizations can conduct services in the same space as they hand out government aid, so long as the services don’t take place while the aid is being delivered. But the rule allows groups to schedule prayers immediately before or after dispensing taxpayer-funded aid.

Bush’s orders also reversed longstanding rules forbidding the use of government funds to pay for employees who are required to take an oath to one religion. In addition, the president’s orders allowed faith-based groups to keep religious symbols in places where they distribute taxpayer-funded aid.

And in implementing the president’s orders, the administration rejected efforts to require groups to inform beneficiaries that they don’t have to attend religious services to get the help they need. Instead of a requirement, groups are merely encouraged to make clear to recipients that they don’t have to participate in religious activities.

Bush made some of the changes by executive order only after failing to get Congress to approve them; the bill faltered in the Senate, where moderate Republicans joined Democrats in raising concerns about breaking down the barrier between government and religion.

[snip]

The survey of prime contractors and grantees, based on records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, shows a sharp increase in money going to faith-based groups between fiscal 2001, the last budget of the Clinton administration, and fiscal 2005, the last year for which complete figures were available. Faith-based groups accounted for 10.5 percent of USAID dollars to nongovernmental aid organizations in fiscal 2001, and 19.9 percent in 2005.

The numbers also show that the faith-based initiative overseas is almost exclusively a Christian initiative: Only two Jewish development groups and two Muslim groups of any type got any grants or contracts between fiscal 2001 and fiscal 2005, and Christians received 98.3 percent of all such funds to religious groups from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2005.

[snip]

At Food for the Hungry’s outpost in Lakartinya, staff members spoke openly of how they preach about Jesus while teaching breast-feeding and nutrition. Over the seven years that the group has been operating there, it has helped convert almost the entire area to Christianity, according to it’s own field workers and villagers who participate in the programs.

[snip]

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed Executive Order No. 11246, a landmark directive that required all federal contractors to consider applications “without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

Frustrated by Congress’s refusal to reconsider Johnson’s policy, Bush issued his own order in 2002 specifically allowing faith-based groups to discriminate in hiring for government-funded positions.

[snip]

Bishop Frank Griswold, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the faith in which Bush was raised, said he strongly opposed allowing faith-based contractors to discriminate in hiring. But the bishop said he was unable to express his concerns to Bush.

“I must say it has been very difficult for me — and I think I can speak for the mainline churches as well — to have any substantial engagement with the president,” Griswold said. He said he has been “shunted to one side” by the White House, which has been more interested in rewarding the religious right.

“I think it has to do with politics and power,” Griswold said. “It has a great deal to do with what Mr. Bush perceives to be his base.” Article

Keeping up with Hungarian unrest.

Quakers and guns in Idaho.