(Aryan roots)...Its history starts with the ancient Indo-Iranians, peoples who inhabited parts of what are now Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India."[1]

Freshman Rep. Bobby Bright won his seat in Congress by convincing conservative southeast Alabama voters that he wasn't a typical Democrat. Barely a week into his Washington career, he showed that he meant it.

On a vote that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saw as a slam dunk for kicking off the new Congress, Bright opposed a bill named after an Alabama tire-factory worker that would ease restrictions for women challenging pay discrimination. A few days later, Bright voted against another Democratic rallying point, expanding health insurance for children of the working poor.

Bright's rebellion against his party's agenda illustrates the trade-offs that Democrats face in reaching into conservative strongholds like the Deep South to build their majorities in Washington.

During the first few months of the Obama administration, the new House members that Democrats worked so hard to elect in recent years have been among the least loyal with their votes. Of the 20 Democrats who voted against the party's $3.6 trillion budget, for example, 12 were elected during the Democrats' resurgence in the past two elections. According to a Washington Post votes database, nine of the 10 Democrats with the most independent voting records are freshmen or second-termers.

So far, the newcomers haven't caused Pelosi too much heartache; her majority is big enough to withstand sacrificing a few votes here and there. But as Congress moves on to contentious issues such as health care, immigration and the environment, the new players could become key brokers in what Pelosi can deliver.

They also can air their differences publicly and undermine the party's message, as two-term Democrat Heath Shuler of North Carolina did in February when he said Pelosi wasn't pursuing the bipartisan compromise for which President Barack Obama called in his campaign.

Democrats gained a total of 55 House seats in the last two elections, including 24 in November. Many of the gains came in Republican-leaning districts in states like Alabama, Virginia, and Arizona that would probably balk at more liberal representation.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who runs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said the party understands the position that new members are in and is willing to allow them broad independence.

"They understand the majority of the caucus' views on these things, but it's left to them to determine what's in the best interests of their constituents," Van Hollen said, echoing similar comments from Pelosi.

"If you had tighter margins it obviously makes it more difficult," Van Hollen added. But "right now we are very focused on issues that tend to bring the Democratic caucus together."

The party's more liberal wing doesn't necessarily share the "big tent" philosophy.

Groups such as Accountability Now and Campaign for America's Future plan to target Democrats who they believe are out of step with Democratic momentum.

Accountability Now, a coalition of activists and labor unions, has begun raising money to mount primary challenges to some Democrats. Director Jeff Hauser said the organization recognizes that ideologies vary widely by region but is concerned that new members eager to raise money for re-election are being too strongly influenced by business and lobbying interests.

"There was an agenda that Democrats were elected to enact," he said. "What we fear is that lobbyist-funded members will push the consensus away from what the people elected members to do."

The group is still determining which members to target. But Hauser said they will not shy away from going after vulnerable Democrats in conservative districts if it sees them as out of step.

Such movements have proved effective in the past, most notably against Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who was forced to become an independent after losing the Democratic primary in 2006.

New moderates like Bright and Walt Minnick of Idaho, however, don't appear concerned.

Minnick, the first Idaho Democrat to serve in Congress in 14 years, said his district is fiscally conservative and that's how he votes.

Asked what makes him a Democrat, he said he disagrees with Republicans that "the solution to every economic situation is a big tax cut."

"You have to realize that there are some things with government spending that are essential," Minnick said. "My big concern is deficits. Democrats are spending too much, and Republicans are too much in the Dick Cheney mode of, 'Deficits don't matter."'

America made clear last week that it would attack Taliban forces in their Swat valley stronghold unless the Pakistan government stopped the militants' advance towards Islamabad.

A senior Pakistani official said the Obama administration intervened after Taliban forces expanded from Swat into the adjacent district of Buner, 60 miles from the capital.

The Pakistani Taliban's inroads raised international concern, particularly in Washington, where officials feared that the nuclear-armed country, which is pivotal to the U.S. war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and against Al Qaeda, was rapidly succumbing to Islamist extremists.

"The implicit threat - if you don't do it, we may have to - was always there," said the Pakistani official. He said that under American pressure, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency told the Taliban to withdraw from Buner on Friday.

However, reports Saturday indicated that the Taliban withdrawal was less than total. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people in the district were still at the mercy of armed militants and their restrictive interpretation of Islamic law.

American military and intelligence forces already run limited ground and air operations on Pakistani soil along the border with Afghanistan. But an overt military operation such as that threatened in Swat, away from the border, would mark a major escalation.

The official said last week's outspoken remarks by Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, were "calculated to ramp up the pressure on Pakistan" to take action. Clinton warned that the terrorists' advance had created a "mortal threat" to world security.

She was one of several American political and military leaders to use unusually strong language about Pakistan's failure to curb the Taliban. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who visited Pakistan, said he was "extremely concerned" about the developments and that the situation was "definitely worse" than two weeks ago.

General David Petraeus, of US Central Command, which oversees Afghanistan - to which America is about to commit 17,000 more troops - said Al Qaeda and Taliban extremists in Pakistan posed an "ever more serious threat to Pakistan's very existence."

Medvedev also repeated Russia's call for a new security pact to replace NATO, an idea that initially got a cool response when first broached at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) meeting in Helsinki in December.

Russia has said NATO is a Cold War relic. It wants a legally binding pact enshrining arms control, a commitment not to use force, and guarantees that no single state or group of states can take a dominant role in the continent's security.

The creator of the Chia Pet is ch-ch-cheesed off after Walgreens pulled a special-edition Chia Obama from its shelves -- apparently over concerns that it might offend customers.

A representative for Walgreens said the company dropped the product because they didn't want it to be misinterpreted. But Chia Pet creator Joseph Pedott told FOXNews.com he was "shocked" when he found out the mega-pharmacy was pulling his merchandise.

The Chia Obama, a bust of the 44th president with sprouting grass-like "hair" in the tradition of the classic Chia Pet, was stocked at the Tampa and Chicago Walgreens stores as a test run.

Pedott said company executives approved the product ahead of time, but it was on the shelves for less than a week when he got an e-mail Friday from Walgreens saying "it's not our image."

"I'm sick about it," Pedott, 76, said, disputing any suggestion that Chia Obama's Chia hair was mocking the Afro hairstyle.

"Obama had an Afro -- does that make him racist?" Pedott said. "So how the hell do you get racist out of it? And number one, you can give him a haircut."

Pedott said he is a Republican, but he voted for Obama and was just trying to do right by the new president.

"It's Americana," Pedott said. "I thought I would take the good name of Chia and support the good things that he's trying to do. ... That was a labor of love."

Pedott said he was so confident the Chia Obama was not offensive he even asked the Rev. Jesse Jackson to screen it when he ran into him recently at a Chicago eatery.

"He said, quote, 'I think this is a find product,' end quote -- I have three witnesses," Pedott said.

Walgreens spokesman Robert Elfinger would not comment on whether the company was concerned about the product being seen as racially insensitive.

"We decided to pull the product because we didn't want it to be subject to any misinterpretation," he said. "People could interpret it through a political viewpoint or other viewpoints, and we wanted to avoid that situation."

It's not the first famous figure Pedott has Chia-ified. He's created prototypes for a Hillary Clinton model, though he hasn't rolled it out on the shelves yet. Plus he did one for Mr. T, at the request of Mr. T's people.

Pedott had to pull advertising for the $19.99 Obama product after hearing from Walgreens, but said he'll try to convince other retailers to give it a go. He's already been putting a lot of work into the marketing.

The online product details give a pretty compelling pitch.

"Can you grow one? YES YOU CAN," they say.

Defamation starts out as a film about anti-Semitism and about people who have set out to expose and fight anti-Semitism around the world. In the course of his research, however, the director discovers that insisting on anti-Semitism can also be a profitable business. The other, perhaps even more dramatic finding of Shamir’s film is the systematic indoctrination of young people in Israel, who are taught on a mass scale that the whole world hates Jews and that the only way to define oneself as an Israeli is on the basis of this worldwide animosity. Defamation is about the use and production of these kinds of negative stereotypes.

The Israeli army has been forced to open an investigation into the conduct of its troops in Gaza after damning testimony from its own front line soldiers revealed the killing of civilians and rules of engagement so lax that one combatant said that they amounted on occasion to “cold-blooded murder”.