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The 22-year-old doesn’t look like the traditional turbaned Taliban commander. His black hair shoots out at all angles from beneath a red cap. He smiles easily and has a neatly trimmed beard.

But Hilal says he is the co-leader of 200 Taliban fighters who operate across the border in Afghanistan. “Two years ago, we only attacked Afghan officials, but now we have so many Talibs that we can attack Americans,” he boasts.

In a rare interview with a Western reporter, Hilal and three other Afghan Taliban fighters describe how they slip into Afghanistan, attack NATO and Afghan forces, and return to Pakistan to rest.

“Everybody in the neighborhood knows we are Talibs,” says Noman, a 19-year-old fighter with a blue-white block-printed turban. “Paki-stan is a little bit free for us.”

The interview was conducted over two days in a small house made of yellow mud in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province. The fighters, who won’t give their real names, say they are here for a refresher course in Taliban ideology in a Pakistani religious school.

“We are enormously organized,” brags Mustafa, a 20-year-old wearing a black turban usually favored by conservative Muslims.

“Even British defense officials say they face a lot of problems from the Taliban.”

A year ago, such confident talk from Taliban fighters could have been chalked up to bravado. But with more than 50 suicide attacks in the past six months, resistance by large Taliban units in the increasingly volatile provinces of Kandahar and Helmand in the south, and a greater willingness of Taliban fighters to come out into the open and speak their minds are all indications that the Taliban resurgence is no longer a matter of conjecture.

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Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany’s top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The plaintiffs in the case include 11 Iraqis who were prisoners at Abu Ghraib, as well as Mohammad al-Qahtani, a Saudi held at Guantanamo, whom the U.S. has identified as the so-called “20th hijacker” and a would-be participant in the 9/11 hijackings. As TIME first reported in June 2005, Qahtani underwent a “special interrogation plan,” personally approved by Rumsfeld, which the U.S. says produced valuable intelligence. But to obtain it, according to the log of his interrogation and government reports, Qahtani was subjected to forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, prolonged stress positions, sleep deprivation and other controversial interrogation techniques.

[..]

Germany was chosen for the court filing because German law provides “universal jurisdiction” allowing for the prosecution of war crimes and related offenses that take place anywhere in the world. Indeed, a similar, but narrower, legal action was brought in Germany in 2004, which also sought the prosecution of Rumsfeld. The case provoked an angry response from Pentagon, and Rumsfeld himself was reportedly upset. Rumsfeld’s spokesman at the time, Lawrence DiRita, called the case a “a big, big problem.” U.S. officials made clear the case could adversely impact U.S.-Germany relations, and Rumsfeld indicated he would not attend a major security conference in Munich, where he was scheduled to be the keynote speaker, unless Germany disposed of the case. The day before the conference, a German prosecutor announced he would not pursue the matter, saying there was no indication that U.S. authorities and courts would not deal with allegations in the complaint.

In bringing the new case, however, the plaintiffs argue that circumstances have changed in two important ways. Rumsfeld’s resignation, they say, means that the former Defense Secretary will lose the legal immunity usually accorded high government officials. Moreover, the plaintiffs argue that the German prosecutor’s reasoning for rejecting the previous case — that U.S. authorities were dealing with the issue — has been proven wrong.

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The Quebec ministry of education has told unlicensed Christian evangelical schools that they must teach Darwin’s theory of evolution and sex education or close their doors after an Outaouais school board complained the provincial curriculum wasn’t being followed.

“Quebec children are legally required to follow the provincial curriculum … but these evangelical schools teach their own courses on creationism and sexuality that don’t follow the Quebec curriculum,” said Pierre Daoust, director general of the Commission Scolaire au Coeur-des-Vallees in Thurso, whose complaint sparked the provincewide investigation.

Quebec law requires school boards assure the ministry of education that every child between the ages six of and 16, with the exception of home-schooled children, receives an adequate education, he said.

But the roughly 15 elementary and high school students who attend a school operated by l’Eglise evangelique near Saint-Andre-Avellin are being educated according to a Bible-based curriculum and their diplomas will not be recognized anywhere in Canada.

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A U.K. law has been passed that makes it an offense to launch denial-of-service attacks, which experts had previously called “a legal gray area.”

Among the provisions of the Police and Justice Bill 2006, which gained Royal Assent on Wednesday, is a clause that makes it an offense to impair the operation of any computer system. Other clauses prohibit preventing or hindering access to a program or data held on a computer, or impairing the operation of any program or data held on a computer.

The maximum penalty for such cybercrimes has also been increased from 5 years to 10 years.

Those descriptions matches DRM perfectly. Can we send all the record companies to jail now?

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Watching Republicans like Tom Delay dismiss the Democratic victors as a “lame duck Congress” reminds me of one of my favorite political stories. It’s an instructive tale about how “good ol’ boys” who try to undercut a newcomer’s power can wind up eating their words in the end.

Here’s what happened: In 1970, Vermont was still a Republican stronghold. There wasn’t much of a constituency for a socialist political party…but a few anti-war activists decided to form one anyway. They called it Liberty Union. During the ’70s, the same 3 or 4 guys from the Liberty Union Party seemed to run in every election, for whatever office was open. I don’t think any of them ever got more than 5% or 6% of the vote, and they were never a factor in the elections. But they kept running. A lot of mainstream Vermonters considered them a joke.

In 1978, one of Liberty Union’s perennial candidates–a Jewish socialist from Brooklyn–quit the party and moved to Burlington, the state’s biggest city (population: 37,000) and home of the University of Vermont (UVM). He gave up politics, rented an apartment and worked as a writer. But his retirement didn’t last long. Burlington had been run by the same group of good ol’ boys for decades. The mayor, Gordon Paquette, had been in office for 5 or 6 terms; no one stood a chance against him. However, in 1981, as the mayoral election approached, Paquette and the local police got into a dispute. If I remember correctly, the cops wanted a raise; the mayor wouldn’t give it to them. (Note: anyone out there remember the details?) The socialist from Brooklyn jumped into the mayoral race as an independent, and a supporter of workers’ rights, standing 100% behind the cops. And the police, as a symbolic “Screw you” to Mayor Paquette, endorsed the Socialist in return. It was as improbable an alliance as you could imagine. But the unexpected mainstream support turned Our Hero into a credible candidate–albeit a prohibitive underdog–for the first time in his career. And he took advantage of it. With a dedicated group of supporters, he went out and registered UVM students like crazy. He also reached out to people who’d become weary of Paquette’s political machine. Of course, Mayor Paquette and his cronies didn’t take this challenge seriously. Why should they? So on election day, they–and pretty much everyone else in town–were astonished to discover that the socialist had actually won the race…by 10 votes. (Or 12, depending on who’s telling the tale).

That was just the beginning. The shell-shocked good ol’ boys of the city council considered the election a fluke. They were sure there was no way the socialist would ever get elected again–he was an automatic “lame duck.” So they decided to ignore him. For example, they began scheduling city council meetings without informing the mayor’s office when and where they were being held. But they miscalculated–instead of making the new mayor seem irrelevant, they made him a sympathetic figure, And he fought back. He publicized the council’s outrageous actions, admonishing them for violating the public trust. In the next election, the public responded–not by returning a Good Ol’ Boy to the mayor’s office, but by throwing city council members out. The socialist got his own council members installed, and Burlington’s city government was transformed permanently. Today, the mayor has moved on, but the city government is still stocked with his allies.

And what happened to this lame duck? Well, he became a political icon in Vermont, respected for his independence and honesty, and gradually moved up the political ladder: On Tuesday, former Burlington mayor Bernie Sanders was elected to the US Senate. We can only hope all of our newly elected “lame duck” Democrats do just as well.

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Marie Steichen died two months ago but she won a battle to become a county commissioner for a small South Dakota town in the US elections, an official said.

Jerauld county auditor Cindy Peterson said that the election list closed on August 1, and while Steichen died from cancer in September her name was kept on the list for Tuesday’s election.

Steichen beat a Republican rival by 100 votes to 64 and Peterson said she believed that voters knew the woman was dead but wanted to make their political point.

The story gets worse for the GOP.

Marie Steichen didn’t just win the election, her Republican opponent was an incumbent.

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A doctor at a family planning clinic told a patient that she needed an exorcism because there was something sinister moving around inside her stomach, a medical tribunal was told yesterday.

Joyce Pratt, 44, allegedly told the patient, who was seeking contraceptive advice, that she might be possessed by an evil spirit and needed religious rather than medical help.

She gave the woman crosses and trinkets to ward off black magic, allegedly told her that her mother was a witch, that she and her husband were trying to kill her, and suggested that she visit a Roman Catholic priest at Westminster Cathedral in London.

During the consultation at the Westside Contraceptive Clinic in Central London the doctor was said to have told the patient that she had black magic powers that could help to alleviate the problem.

The patient, identified only as Mrs K, was said to have left the clinic “very shaken and intimidated�?.

The General Medical Council’s fitness-to-practise panel in Manchester was due to start a three-day hearing yesterday but Dr Pratt failed to appear. She was also not legally represented.