Seventeen professors and students gathered around a table yesterday to hear Sidney Griffith, professor at Catholic University of America, speak about 10th-century Baghdad. Griffith used the personage of Yahaya ibn Adi, a prominent Christian Intellectual of the time, as a tool to describe Baghdad at the time: a society comprised of Jews, Christians and Muslims willing to correspond and talk with each other.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Army Sgt. Robin Cameron stood guard outside a once opulent Iraqi shopping mall that now serves as a small U.S. military outpost, trying not to think about what he was missing with his family on Christmas.

"It's just another day in Iraq," he said, waving through a convoy of armored vehicles heading out to patrol Baghdad's Mansour neighborhood, once home to Saddam Hussein's favored officers and later an insurgent stronghold known for its deadly attacks on American troops.

Although troop levels are expected to start declining after provincial elections on Jan. 31, the same number are in Iraq today — about 146,000 — as in May 2003, when President George W. Bush declared the end of major hostilities two months after the invasion.

Last Thursday, the Iraqi Parliament ratified the Status of Forces Agreement, a deal to have U.S. troops out of Iraq by 2011. SOFA hits home for many Americans, especially those with family and friends serving in Iraq. But for some Cornell students and Ithacans, the war extends past the news and television reports into the hot Iraqi desert itself.

Major Richard E. Brown, a training instructor in Cornell’s ROTC program and Army Reservist, was deployed to Baghdad for the first time in 2004. He was deployed again this past October to the Forward Operations Base in Kalsu, Iraq, 30 miles south of Baghdad in the Babil province.

We are less than three weeks away from Elec­tion Day. In the longest presidential campaign in Amer­ican history, 15 primary candidates became two presidential hopefuls: Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain. At this point in time, a typical campaign analyst would presume both platforms would have been well articulated, challenged, and disseminated in the presidential debates. But this is not a typical campaign, and that does not seem to be the case. In the midst of bemused moderators and citizens it is important to ask, what have we learned from Obama and McCain in the debates?

While the Iraq war is competing with Hurricane Ike and the financial crisis for media coverage in the new as of late, last night an audience in RPCC heard a range of active duty and retired armed services officers offer their insight on the time they spent serving overseas.

In “Today’s Military: Exposed and Uncen-sored,” a range of mid-level and high-grade officers discussed their views of the war, its successes and failures. Sponsored by the Residential Programs and the ROTC program, the aim of the panel discussion was to present a side of the war rarely seen in the media.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi officials stepped up pressure on the United States on Tuesday to agree to a specific timeline to withdraw American forces, a sign of the government's growing confidence as violence falls.

The tough words come as the Bush administration is running out of time to reach a needed troop deal before the U.S. election in November and the president's last months in office. Some type of agreement is required to keep American troops in Iraq after a U.N. mandate expires on Dec. 31.

The Iraqi timeline proposal made public Tuesday appears to set an outer limit, requiring U.S. forces to fully withdraw five years after the Iraqis take the lead on security nationwide — though that precondition could itself take years.

BAGHDAD (AP) — A suicide bomber blew himself up Thursday in a crowd of police recruits in northwestern Iraq, killing at least 16 men and wounding 14 others, an official said.

The blast occurred in Sinjar, a town near the Syrian border that was the site of the deadliest attack of the war — a series of suicide truck bombings that killed an estimated 500 people.

Nobody has claimed responsibility for the latest attack. But it bore the hallmarks of al-Qaida in Iraq, underscoring Iraqi claims that insurgents have fled to remote areas to escape a U.S.-Iraqi offensive under way in Mosul, about 74 miles east of Sinjar.

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — President Bush paid tribute today to America’s fighting men and women who died in battle, saying national leaders must have “the courage and character to follow their lead” in preserving peace and freedom.

“On this Memorial Day, I stand before you as the commander in chief and try to tell you how proud I am,” Bush told an audience of military figures, veterans and their families at Arlington National Cemetery. Of the men and women buried in the hallowed cemetery, he said, “They’re an awesome bunch of people and the United States is blessed to have such citizens.”

That provoked a standing ovation from the crowd in a marble amphitheater where Bush spoke. “Whoo-hoo!” shouted one woman, who couldn’t contain her enthusiasm.