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MARCH 2003 IN HISTORY
Saturday, March 1, 2003
U.S. captures Al Qaeda leader Khaild Shaikh Mohammed

Wednesday, March 5, 2003
50th anniversary of death of Stalin observed

Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic assassinated

Friday, March 14, 2003
New York City subway tokens discontinued

Wednesday, March 20, 2003
U.S. attacks Iraq

• Timeline: February 2003
• Timeline: January 2003

Latest War links:
• The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson and Newsweek's Melinda Liu with firsthand accounts of the first week of the war from Baghdad.

• War and weblogs: The "warblog" getting the most attention is written by the presumably pseudonymous Salam Pax, a blogger in Baghdad. Fond of neither Saddam Hussein nor the U.S., he had been posting descriptions of the city up until one week ago. Then, either his Internet connection went down or the coverage of his blog in Western media (including particularly detailed accounts in the New Yorker and BBC), may have sealed his fate at the hands of Iraqi authorities. More about Salam's stardom and silence in the Philadelphia Inquirer and San Francisco Chronicle, and more about warblogging in the Washington Post.

Another pseudonymous blogger, Victor Eremita, traveled to Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War to work with Kurdish refugees. He says his time there changed him "from a humanitarian pacifist to a Bonhoeffer pacifist." He writes about his experiences, his views, and his response to Sojourners' "Third Way" at his weblog: obedienthound.blogspot.com.

• New York Times daily news overviews: March 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30

• Latest news from CNN, the BBC, NPR, NY Times, Wash. Post, and more.

• Last week: Iraq Digest

From the New York Times:

ZOR ORGUN, Afghanistan—Nearly 20 years after the bombing, the town remains a jumble of broken walls and gaping craters. The weather has smoothed the jagged edges, and children now play among the rubble, but the horror and scale of the carpet bombing that demolished this ancient walled town of 2,500 homes remains vivid. … Now, in a testament to the extraordinary resilience of the Afghans, the old, ruined town of Zor Orgun is coming back to life. Hundreds of families have returned from Pakistan in recent years, the first few arriving seven years ago, and as many as 500 families coming in a rush in 2002. Many have opted to resettle away from the ruins and build new houses on surrounding open land, but among the rubble, newly smoothed mud-brick walls are redefining the streets and alleyways and are raising the town from the dead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/25/international/asia/25AFGH.html*

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