Summary: Members of Afghanistan’s new peace council say releasing Taliban figures detained at Guantanamo Bay and scratching scores of others off the U.N. sanctions list would jump-start peace talks aimed at ending the 9-year-old war. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 12, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that Rep. Michele Bachmann told bloggers at an event in Washington: “Quite honestly I don’t even know anything about MSNBC.” To refresh Bachmann’s memory, MSNBC is the cable network on which she dishonored her office on October 17, 2008, when she called for McCarthy-like witch hunts to find out which members of Congress are “pro-America or anti-America.”

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Summary: Followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stomped on and burned an effigy of President George Bush in the same central Baghdad square where Iraqis beat a toppled statue of Saddam Hussein with their sandals five years earlier. Chanting and waving flags, thousands of Iraqis filled Firdous Square to protest a proposed U.S.-Iraqi security pact that would allow American troops to stay for three more years.

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