MID EAST CLIPS

WASH POST - The U.S. military plans to boost the number of neighborhood outposts across the capital by more than 30 percent this year even as American forces begin to withdraw, the new commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad said Tuesday. During a luncheon with reporters in the heavily fortified Green Zone, Maj. Gen. Jeffery W. Hammond said he would increase the number of garrisons in the city from 75 to 99 by June to "push ourselves into locations where maybe in the past we didn't go before."

ONE WORLD - State legislators in Vermont introduced legislation demanding the state's National Guard troops return from Iraq. Lawmakers in Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania are poised to push similar legislation. . . Vermont, like other rural parts of the country, has suffered disproportionately from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, say analysts. A November 2006 report by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire found soldiers from rural Vermont had the highest death rate in the nation.

INDEPENDENT, UK - Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, has been inundated with appeals to save the life of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student journalist sentenced to death after being accused of downloading an internet report on women's rights. While international protests mounted over the affair, with the British Government saying it had already raised its concerns, hundreds of people marched through the capital, Kabul, demanding Mr Kambaksh's release. . .