Faisal Mahmood/ReutersMilitants Storm Seat of Military in PakistanBy SALMAN MASOOD Soldiers took positions outside the army headquarters after gunmen took more than a dozen security officers hostage. The standoff continued into the evening. Latest Attacks Seen as Warning to Government    

  Sean Penn seeks interview with Fidel Castro in Cuba for Vanity Fair• Communist leader has not spoken to press in three years
• Oscar winner visited Island of Youth yesterdayRory Carroll, Latin America correspondent guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 October 2009 17.11 GMT Article historySean Penn visits Isla de la Juventud in Havana. Photograph: Mayangdi Inzaulgarat/EPA The actor Sean Penn has flown to Cuba to chase what would be the biggest scoop of his career as a part-time journalist: an interview with Fidel Castro.The Oscar winner, who last year bagged interviews with Raúl Castro and Hugo Chávez, is reportedly on assignment for Vanity Fair in his quest to meet Cuba's former president.In a sign of Havana's approval the communist party newspaper Granma covered Penn's visit yesterday to the Island of Youth, where he visited a gallery and met artists.According to the online magazine tmz.com Penn hopes to ask Fidel about Cuba's evolving relationship with the Obama administration.The interview - which has not been confirmed - would be a coup for the Hollywood star's brand of activist journalism. No western journalist has seen let alone interviewed the 83-year-old leader since an intestinal illness forced him from public view three years ago. Fidel stepped aside from the presidency but remains influential in Cuba - and an iconic, enigmatic figure abroad.Penn, an outspoken liberal and anti-war activist, took a break from filming to visit Iraq as a journalist in 2004. He followed up with a visit to Iran the following year and then befriended Chávez.Venezuela's socialist president, who seldom gives interviews, gave ample access to Penn and arranged an interview with Raúl Castro, Cuba's even more interview-shy president. The stories were published in The Nation and the Huffington Post.Critics say the actor is too soft in the interviews and should leave journalism to professionals. "Why…

 Democrats better reply with a coffee claque, and soonRightwing Tea Party types are not cool, but there are an awful lot of them out there and their rivals have ceded the stage to them Joe Queenan guardian.co.uk, Sunday 7 February 2010 Article historyThis weekend, the fledgling Tea Party movement has been holding a convention in Nashville, Tennessee. White, middle-class, contemptuous of Wall Street, Washington and academia, the Tea Party insurgents view themselves as the descendants of the militiamen who whipped the British at Yorktown. Ironically, with the exception of George Washington, most of the firebrands of the revolution were intellectuals: Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, John Jay, John Adams, James Madison, Samuel Adams. Only Paul ­Revere worked in retail.The Tea Party insurgents have had a nice run recently, disrupting public hearings, shouting down elected officials, scaring the bejesus out of incumbents. They insist they are amateurs, that their movement is spontaneous, though critics suggest otherwise, insisting they are funded by those who wish to see Barack Obama fail. The Tea Partyers despise Obama, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, and the treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, and are fiercely opposed to the government bailout of Wall Street. They hate taxes, the stimulus package, the media and Hollywood, and believe they are the last remaining bulwark of democracy, preventing the US from slipping into socialism. They have put anyone running for re-election on notice that if they fail to toe the Tea Party line, they will walk the plank.All this presents a huge problem for Democrats, because they haven't been able to figure out a way to hold spontaneous tea parties of their own. Traditionally, when populist rage erupts, the Great Unwashed descend on Washington for mass rallies. Such…

 Pushing a Liberal Agenda, With Democrats as TargetBy JACKIE CALMES WASHINGTON — From the capital to Arkansas, liberals plan to spend this week aiming some not-so-friendly fire at President Obama and Congressional Democrats. Up to 2,000 liberal activists began assembling here on Monday for a conference to press the White House and Congress to fight harder for an ambitious progressive agenda, including a generous jobs bill, even as Democrats returned from a holiday recess to resume talks on further shrinking the proposed legislation to satisfy deficit-conscious colleagues. But if things in the capital were not going as the activists wanted, they held out hope for change should Senator Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat they deem too conservative, lose in a runoff on Tuesday night for her party’s nomination. Liberal groups had mobilized behind her rival, Bill Halter, in what they called “a shot across the bow” to other centrists who obstruct or weaken the Democratic agenda. As dismayed as the left-leaning groups are by Congress’s Democratic leadership, which they see as too conciliatory to party conservatives, many of them ultimately blame Mr. Obama for not standing up more forcefully to Republicans. “This is the greatest reform president since Lyndon Johnson, and every progressive in the movement is dismayed and disaffected,” said Robert L. Borosage, the co-director of the liberal Campaign for America’s Future. “Some of that is expectations that were shattered” — by Mr. Obama’s lack of support for a public health insurance option and liberalized rules for union organizing, and his escalation in Afghanistan. “But some of it is a broader question,” Mr. Borosage added, “which is…