California’s Supreme Court has upheld a ban on same-sex marriage - the latest twist in a long-running saga.
The judges rejected a challenge from gay-rights activists to overturn the result of a 2008 referendum which restricted
marriage to heterosexuals.
Prior to the vote, same-sex marriages were legal for six months, during which 18,000 couples were married.
The judges said their ruling was not retroactive - meaning those couples will remain legally married.
Tuesday’s legal showdown was sparked by a 4 November vote in which Californians backed Proposition 8 - the proposal to
restrict marriage to heterosexual couples - by 52.3% to 47.7%.
The campaign over November’s vote cost more than $80m (£51m) - the most expensive ballot measure on a social issue in US
history.
Activists challenged the result of the referendum, saying the measure violated the civil rights of gay couples.
They argued that the ballot measure revised the state constitution’s equal-protection clause so dramatically that it should
have had legislature approval before being put to voters.
But the seven-strong panel of judges rejected the appeal by a six-to-one majority.
In their ruling, the judges said the campaigners were arguing that it was “just too easy” to amend the state constitution
through the ballot process.
“It is not a proper function of this court to curtail that process; we are constitutionally bound to uphold it,” the ruling
said.
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Yet there has been plenty of misunderstanding about what happened in Iraq two years ago.
Even many US officers now admit that the importance of the surge was as much symbolic as military, demonstrating to
insurgents that the Americans were not about to leave.
That was significant, but the key change was what happened before the surge was even announced - the decision by many Sunni
Iraqis to turn against al-Qaeda.
Without that transformation, the war in Iraq could have got even worse.
So far, there is no sign of that kind of change in mood in the Taliban’s heartland areas in southern and eastern
Afghanistan.
Commanders may answer that is because they still need more troops to be able to keep insurgents from returning to areas they
have taken.
But 30,000 extra troops was very little for a country the size of Iraq, and one with better roads and more people living in
towns and cities. If the mood had still been against them, it is unlikely that would have been a sufficient force.
In larger and more rural Afghanistan, it is that much harder to control territory and influence the mood - as the Russians
found in the 1980s, with many more soldiers.
What is more, although many Americans may want to call it a success, few Iraqis use that term to describe the state of their
country two years after the Bush surge.
There may be less bloodshed than before, but there are still attacks in Iraq every day.
In the first six months of this year, more than 2,000 Iraqi civilians died in violence, over double the number in
Afghanistan in the same period.
And the casualty rate in Iraq has risen again in recent weeks because of an increase in attacks since the US pullout from
the cities.
More than 100 people were killed in mass bombings in central Baghdad last week.
The US-trained Iraqi security forces now in charge in Baghdad are taking much of the blame for allowing the bombers to get
through.
That is the plan in Afghanistan too, that Afghan security forces will take over from foreign troops.
But the end result may be a lot messier and unhappy than anyone wants to admit.
The rising deaths among US, British and other foreign troops in Afghanistan are the unavoidable result, commanders and
politicians say, of the renewed effort to turn things round in what was the original post 9/11 war.
The language has all changed. Now, Afghanistan is called the “war of necessity”, Iraq “the war of choice”.
There has been lots of talk of new policies and tactics, and learning from “successes” in Iraq.
It is a well-established pattern, of ideas being recycled between the two wars, going back to the US-led invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001.
But are the lessons from Iraq so positive for Afghanistan now?
Even some of those fighting there today are unsure of the reasons why.
“The Iraq war was different from this war,” a US marine in Afghanistan’s Helmand province told a BBC reporter recently.
“That was definitely a war on terrorism. Here I don’t know. No-one even mentions 9/11 any more. That’s why I went to Iraq.”
Yet there is hope the Taliban in Afghanistan will be beaten by another Iraq-style “surge” of US and foreign troops -
although American commanders are shy of the comparison to Iraq.
With more boots on the ground, US and Nato forces, goes the thinking, will be better able to hold ground and protect the
population.
US President Barack Obama may order thousands more troops in later this year, so the Afghan surge could turn out to be even
larger than the 30,000 reinforcements President George W Bush sent to Iraq in 2007.
Arriving at the al Baghdadiya compound, a trumpeter and two drummers sounded a welcome for Mr Zaidi - and in his honour, three sheep were slaughtered live on his own channel.
At his modest central Baghdad flat, his family prepared an exuberant and emotional welcome home.
They danced, they put up balloons and posters, and his young nephews and nieces practised a celebratory song - roughly translated as “Bush Bush listen well, we said goodbye with a pair of shoes”.
On the open corridor outside his flat, another sheep waited patiently for its end - six more were assembled down in the street.
As the day - and the heat - wore on, the family handed out soft drinks to waiting reporters.
Non-Muslims (and the non-observant) accepted eagerly - but for the rest it is Ramadan, and a fast is a fast, even if it is 40C (104F) in the shade.
But Mr Zaidi never turned up. Reporters dispersed, the family went back inside, and the six sheep in the street were taken away - leaving the one animal upstairs alone there again with its bowl of water.
Not all Iraqis admire him - may thought his gesture was rude and unjustified.
According to Arab tradition, throwing shoes and calling the intended target a dog was a double insult.
Where were you? Where were you?,” screams the veiled woman on the screen, before breaking into heaving sobs.
She has already lost one son to drug-related gang violence and the other is late home.
“I was really crying, I wasn’t acting,” says Nisrin Rihan, one of the non-professional actors catapulted into the international limelight by the film Ajami.
Next year, the gritty tale about mafia-style murders will become the first Arabic language film to represent Israel at the Oscars.
Like Ms Rihan, who has lost three relatives to gang crime, most of its actors are locals with first-hand experience of the sprawling, scruffy streets of Ajami, a former slum in the port city of Jaffa.
Impoverished Israeli Arabs shooting one another in the shadow of the gleaming towers of Tel Aviv is far from Israel’s preferred international image.
And the aggressive police and brutal killing of a Jewish character shows a dark underside to the ideal of coexistence sometimes touted in mixed Jewish-Arab areas like Jaffa.
But many Israeli film critics and cinema-goers are nevertheless gushing over the film, shot in an intense, documentary style.
Directed jointly by Yaron Shani, a Jewish Israeli, and Skander Copti, an Israeli Arab born and raised in Ajami, it has so far clocked up the Israeli Ophir and Wolgin prizes, and a special mention in Cannes.
But in Ajami itself, the reaction is mixed.
Revenge is the problem. When someone gets killed it just goes on and on…” says student Awad Katta,19.
“It’s quiet now, but four or five years ago someone was killed every week.”
Like many Israeli-Arab viewers, Mr Katta complains that the film makes scant reference to the poverty and historical oppression which he sees as being behind the violence.
Until the war which led to Israel being founded broke out in 1948, Jaffa was the considered the cultural capital of what was then British Mandate Palestine.
Thousands of its Arab residents fled during the fighting.
Israeli Arabs - people of Palestinian descent living in what is now Israel - lived under martial law for nearly two decades.
Since then they have faced widely documented discrimination.
A young man in Ajami “doesn’t know if he’s Palestinian or Israeli, he’s confused, he doesn’t know what he is, what he wants to do,” says Ms Rihan.
“They don’t know how to express themselves, when they fight the easiest thing is to pull out a gun or a knife.”
“I’m shocked that Jews like the film more than Arabs, even though it shows that we are like this because of them!”, she adds.
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Kabul’s writ has never run strong in the remote southern plains of Helmand province. For this reason, it has emerged as the most significant Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. Further south, across the border in Pakistan, lies the equally remote Noshki-Chaghai region of Balochistan province.
Since 9/11 this region has been in turmoil. In the Baramcha area on the Afghan side of the border, the Taliban have a major base. From there they control militant activities as far afield as Nimroz and Farah provinces in the west, Oruzgan in the north and parts of Kandahar province in the east. They also link up with groups based in the Waziristan region of Pakistan.
Commander Mansoor Dadullah, a one-time Taliban chief of the province who has since developed differences with the Taliban leadership, comes from Helmand, but he has currently shifted his operations to Zabul province and across the border into Balochistan.
Taliban from Baramcha region move freely across the border, and often take their injured to hospitals in the Pakistani town of Dalbandin in Chaghai.
The Helmand Taliban have been able to capture territory and hold it, mostly in the south of the province. They constantly threaten traffic on the highway that connects Kandahar with Herat.
British troops have a major base in the town of Gereshk, along the Kandahar-Herat road. Fresh American troops have also been deployed in the area. They have recently pushed back the Taliban from some of their strongholds, bringing the Garmsir area of the province under government control.
