Summary: Iranian demonstrators, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Death to Obama,” burned photographs of Barack Obama in Tehran as they protested against America’s inaction over Israel’s Gaza offensive. Iranian demonstrators have often burned effigies or pictures of U.S. presidents, but this appeared to be the first time Obama’s picture had been defaced, a week before his inauguration as president.

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Summary: Security forces used tear gas and batons to repel anti-Israel protesters who tried to attack a U.S. consulate in Pakistan as tens of thousands of people demonstrated worldwide against Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip. … Seven years after a U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan routed the Taliban regime, hard-line Islamic fighters who had scattered under massive bombardment to their villages and rear bases in Pakistan once again govern large swaths of Afghanistan and are dug in across regions that surround the capital Kabul, saying they welcome the U.S. military’s proposal to send as many as 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan by summer 2009 because it will give them more chances to kill “infidels.”

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Summary: President George W. Bush rejected a plea from Israel in 2008 to help it raid Iran’s main nuclear complex, opting instead to authorize a new U.S. covert action aimed at sabotaging Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, according to the New York Times.

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Summary: Anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on the Iraqi resistance to stage “revenge operations” against American forces to protest Israel’s Gaza offensive.

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Summary: In an exit interview on CBS “Face the Nation,” Vice President Dick Cheney offered a spirited defense of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, of which he was a key proponent and architect, saying the United States was close to achieving its aims in Iraq.

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