-Iraqi forces found a reputed toxic-weapons laboratory featuring poisonous chemicals and anthrax recipes.

-Roughly half of Fallujah's mosques doubled as military outposts. Their minarets became sniper's nests. American GIs found artillery shells, machine guns, and anti-tank mines at the Saad Bin Waqas Mosque on November 24. The Sunni shrine also housed a suspected mobile bomb factory inside a truck, rocket-propelled grenades, surface-to-air missile parts, and, a military spokesman told the Associated Press, "documents that detailed insurgent interrogations of recent kidnap victims."

-Dublin-born Margaret Hassan, 59, married an Iraqi, converted to Islam, and spent 30 years bringing Iraqis medicine, clean water, and other relief. She also denounced the Iraq war. Impossible-to-please Islamic extremists kidnapped her in October. A mid-November videotape showed an unidentified terrorist fatally shooting a blindfolded captive believed to be Hassan.

-James Mollen, 48, cheerfully spent 16 months improving Iraq's beleaguered schools and linking some to the Internet. Nonetheless, a Zarqawi-tied assassin fatally shot Mollen in the head as he drove through Baghdad November 24.

-A Sunni communiqué promised, as NBC News's Richard Engel reported November 18, "to kill all organizers of coming elections here, and anyone who votes." Not since the Ku Klux Klan's glory days in the 1950s and '60s have hooded villains threatened lethally to disenfranchise those who aim to cast and count ballots.

-When Iran's theocrats are not enriching uranium, they destroy their own people — even teenagers. As the December 13 National Review notes, a local Islamic judge sentenced a 14-year-old boy for breaking the Ramadan fast. Last month, he endured 85 lashes, then died. Earlier this year, officials publicly hanged a 16-year-old girl for having pre-marital sex.

-An Iranian group, seemingly with government supporters, is training 20,000 volunteers for suicide operations, the AP reports. The Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement (HCMGIM) recently let 300 applicants choose among preparing for suicide attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, similar assaults in Israel, or assassination attempts on Salman Rushdie, the British author of The Satanic Verses against whom the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa. (Although Tehran later backed off of this death warrant, Khomeini died before rescinding it, so it technically remains in force.)