Summary: President-elect Barack Obama says his administration will not compromise its ideals to fight terrorism, adding at a press conference to announce his CIA and national intelligence nominees, Leon Panetta and Adm. Dennis Blair, that he has told them to honor the Geneva Conventions.

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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: Iraq remained the deadliest country for media workers in 2008, followed by India and Mexico, although the number of deaths was down sharply from the previous year. A total of 109 journalists and support staff in 36 countries died while covering the news in 2008, down from 172 in 2007, largely due to a decline in the number of media workers killed in Iraq.

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Summary: Year-end “honors” for U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann that couldn’t be accommodated in the December 31, 2008 Minnesota 6th Congressional District Year in Review. … Comparing the U.S. decision to hasten elections in Iraq with the Bush administration’s support for a vote in the Palestinian territories that was won by U.S. foe Hamas in 2006, Iyad Allawi, a former U.S.-installed prime minister of Iraq, said that despite repeated warnings, U.S. officials blindly foisted a Western-style democracy on Iraq, helping plunge it into sectarian bloodshed and a political morass.

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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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Summary: A female suicide bomber killed at least 38 and wounded 72 in an attack on pilgrims entering the revered Imam Moussa al-Kadhim shrine in Kadhimiya, northwestern Baghdad, on January 4, 2009. … Security incidents in Iraq on Jan. 3, 2009, as reported by Reuters. … January 2008 update of key facts, figures, and statistics on Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

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Summary: More than 2 million Iraqis have fled the kidnappings, car bombings, and killings that have racked their homeland since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The United States has admitted more than 16,000 Iraqi refugees in the past two years and expects to more than double that number by the end of 2009. A coalition of advocates, including Refugees International, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, is calling on the United States to nearly triple the money it spends on the displaced Iraqis while allowing the entry of as many as 105,000 in 2009 — a sevenfold increase over current admissions.

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Summary: Between 8,300 and 9,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2008, bringing the total number of civilian deaths since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 to at least 98,400, according to Iraq Body Count.

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Summary: The Taliban has long operated its own shadow government in the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, but its power is now spreading north to the doorstep of Kabul. More than seven years after the U.S.-led invasion, the Islamic militia is attempting to reconstitute the government by which it ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s. … Grim statistic: 2008 has been the deadliest year yet for NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. … At least 22 people were killed and 50 wounded after a bomb tore through a busy square in a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad.

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The terrorism threat to the United States over the next five years will be driven by instability in the Middle East and Africa, persistent challenges to border security, and increasing Internet savvy — with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear [CBRN] attacks considered the most dangerous threats — according to a Homeland Security Threat Assessment for the years 2008-2013.

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