Car bombs and mortar attacks continue across Iraq, with at least 40 civilians dying today. The violence comes as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki continues his search for a new defense and interior minister.

The Pentagon says faulty brakes caused the deadly crash of U.S. military trucks in Kabul, Afghanistan yesterday that sparked ongoing riots there.

Will voter discontent make a third party presidential run viable? Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post details the new group Unity ‘08’s plans to possibly take on both the Democrats and Republicans. Unity’s diverse “Founding Council” includes a high school senior, college students, former Carter administration officials and the former Governor of Maine. Republican political consultants are also in the mix, but so far no candidate.

The Dow and NASDAQ head down on news of Henry Paulson’s appointment to the Treasury, rising oil prices and lower consumer confidence numbers, but the president of the Federal Bank in Chicago tells CNBC that the economy is “very strong at this point,” raising prospects for another interest rate hike.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that government employees do not have an absolute right to free speech, when it comes to speaking out on issues related to their official duties. The case is Garcetti v. Ceballos.

The number of detainees on hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay has increased dramatically in recent months, the Pentagon said. 75 prisoners now on strike as of this weekend, up from 3 last year. A spokesperson at the base dismissed the strike as an “Al Qaeda practice” to raise media attention.

A historian’s recent book sheds further light on an alleged U.S Army policy during the Korean War to shoot refugees seeking to cross American defense lines and highlights the Pentagon’s propensity to overlook inconvenient records. The U.S ambassador to South Korea informed the U.S. State Department of the policy in a letter to an assistant Secretary of State in 1950, the AP reports today in its summary of historian Sahr Conway-Lanz’s book Collateral Damage. The order authorizing troops to fire on refugees came one night prior to the alleged refugee massacre at No Gun Ri on July 25, 1950. Back in 1999, an AP investigation reported on the massacre, but Conway-Lanz discovered the ambassador’s letter in the National Archive only recently. The Pentagon apparently overlooked the document during inquiry into the No Gun Ri massacre from 1999 till 2001, despite the fact that it has been residing in the Archive, unclassified, since 1982.