Human-rights groups say anywhere from 200 to 500 Christians were killed by Muslim herdsmen in Nigeria over the weekend. The attacks took place near the central city of Jos and were apparently retaliation for attacks on Muslims in January. As the main city on the fault line between Nigeria’s Muslim north and Christian south, Jos has long been a hotbed of religious violence. Victims from the sectarian violence were placed in mass graves in central Nigeria. Survivors recalled gruesome stories of the previous day’s events. The attackers had placed nets and traps outside the huts of villagers and attacked them with machetes. Unlike previous clashes, this year's attacks have been planned out, leaving hundred dead including babies, the elderly, and anyone else unable to flee.

The next stage of the war in Afghanistan is in the works: Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with General Stanley McChrystal and Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul on Monday to review plans for a new American-led offensive. The campaign will target Kandahar, the city that gave birth to the Taliban. McChrystal said he thinks that there will be enough Afghan and American forces for the assault by early summer; so far, only 6,000 of the 30,000-troop surge that President Obama have arrived. He also stressed that it will not be a dramatic offensive. “There won’t be a D-Day that is climactic,” McChrystal said. “It will be a rising tide of security as it comes.”

In a possible strategic move to regain the "ethical high ground," House Democratic leaders are floating the idea of a party-wide ban on earmarks for the remainder of the year. The idea was mentioned by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but would most likely face resistance from those who use earmarks as a way to send placating pork back home in a tough year for incumbents. But scrapping them now might be a strategic coup, as gridlock in the Senate means House spending bills could get tied up there, and their earmarks could get cut anyway. The decision to proceed with this strategy would have to come soon as earmark requests are due to the Appropriations panel by March 19. Nearly 9,500 earmarks worth $15.9 billion have already been secured by both parties in this fiscal year alone.

Vice President Joe Biden has touched down in Israel as a special envoy announced that Israelis and Palestinians are ready to open an indirect dialogue. One potential wrinkle: A State Department spokesman said Monday that a new Israeli settlement in the West Bank does not violate the recently announced 10-month ban on building there, which experts say may imperil the U.S.'s role in getting both sides to talk directly. Israel says the 112 new apartments were approved before the moratorium went through. The U.S. says the talks can last four months before they announce the results. A breakthrough in the negotiations would be a surprise.

In a Philadelphia rally reminiscent of Barack Obama's campaign days, the president criticized insurance companies, challenged his party members, and called for public support to get health-care reform passed. With a self-proposed deadline of March 18, the president has become vocal about his hopes to have the health-care bill signed into law. "My question to them is, 'When's the right time? If not now, when? If not us, who? Is it a year from now or two years from now or five years from now or 10 years from now?' I think it's right now, and that's why you're here today," said Obama. The bill's success depends on a two-step process beginning with the House's approval of the Senate's health-care bill followed by the passage of a followup bill. If the bill passes, it is expected to dramatically boost support for Democrats in November's mid-term elections, but that's only if they can get past their own party's reluctance. The president will make one more stop in St. Louis to conclude his health-care push on Wednesday.

Some good news for the networks: Sunday night's Academy Awards telecast was the most-watched ceremony since 2005 with 41.3 million viewers, a 15 percent jump from the 2009 ratings. The improvement comes as part of a two-year trend; the 2009 telecast drew in 26 percent more viewers than in 2008. According to Nielsen ratings, viewer demographics also saw a shift, and much of the gain in viewers came from audience members over the age of 50. The great ratings came in spite of the fact that WABC's conflict with Cablevision caused the telecast to go off the air for half an hour ratings in the New York area, normally the show's No. 1 market.

Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) isn't going to go quietly: "I was set up for this from the very, very beginning," says the outgoing congressman from New York, who was accused of sexual harassment by an aide but now says he is being forced out by Democratic leadership because he did not vote for health care. Massa is already booked to go on Glenn Beck for the full hour on Tuesday.  He also has explained details of the ethics investigation. Massa said he and his staff were drunk at a wedding, and one staffer said the congressman should pursue a bridesmaid, which Massa replied to by tousling the hair of a second staffer and saying, “Well, what I really ought to be doing is fracking you.” Though he conceded the statement was inappropriate, he said the complaint was made by a third staffer out of “political correctness.” "Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health-care bill, and now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass,” Massa said. “You connect the dots." Massa also called Rahm Emanuel "son of the devil's spawn" and said he confronted him in a locker room shower when they were both naked.

A Maryland father laid his soldier son to rest in 2006 surrounded by protesters from a Baptist church in Topeka, Kansas, who believe soldiers die in combat as punishment for the U.S.’s permissive attitude toward homosexuality. They have carried signs that say, “Thank God for dead soldiers.” The Supreme Court is now reviewing whether protesting the funerals of soldiers is protected by the First Amendment. A Baltimore jury awarded the soldier’s father $10 million in damages, but the case was later thrown out by the U.S. Court of Appeals. The judges said the signs were not referring directly to the father and his son. Snyder v. Phelps will be argued next October.

“Emanuel seems to serve as a virtual prime minister, the most powerful chief of staff since James Baker managed the White House during Ronald Reagan’s first term,” declares a new profile in The New York Times Magazine. Why then is he so unpopular these days? Both conservatives and liberals hate him—the former say he’s pushed Obama’s ambitious agenda and the latter say he’s not ambitious enough. The Times profile sheds some light on his role in the White House: “Reagan and Obama chose their chiefs of staff to serve exactly as they did,” Peter Baker writes. But Obama and Rahm are not as close as you might suspect—“more friendly than friends.” Apparently, the grumbling about Rahm has annoyed Obama. An aide tells Baker that Obama’s “irritated by the stories” and Emanuel has “expressed regret” to the president. Separately, Politico reports that Obama has told his staff to ignore the palace intrigue.

Dreams do come true: Betty White will soon appear on Saturday Night Live. The former Golden Girl confirmed it herself at Elton John’s Oscars' viewing party, although it is unclear in what capacity exactly she will appear. A Facebook group calling on White to host SNL has 500,000 fans. Asked about the support, White said “I don’t know why or how, but it’s been wonderful.”

Republican State Senator Roy Ashburn, who has time and time again voted against gay-rights measures, confirmed he is gay on a radio show Monday. Ashburn, who took a leave of absence from the California State Senate after being arrested last week for a DUI on his way home from a gay club, announced his homosexuality on the radio and said, “Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long.” Ashburn said his anti-gay rights votes were a reflection of his conservative district and how they wanted him to vote.

After a bout of re-scheduling with the courts, Lil Wayne was sentenced Monday to one year in prison, which could be shortened to eight months for good behavior. The rapper, whose full name is Dwayne Carter, pleaded guilty to attempted criminal possession of a weapon in October, after a loaded semiautomatic gun was found on his tour bus. Carter has released a flurry of work in the leadup to his sentencing, and has seven new videos set for release. "I'll still be rapping in there, have a gang of raps ready when I come back home," he said in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.

The entertainment industry trade publication Variety has let go of two of its most prominent writers to save costs. Todd McCarthy, known for his film reviews, and David Rooney, a theater critic, are two of the eight personnel cuts that went into effect Monday. In addition, the paper is shifting some of its top brass around for an “editorial reorganization.” The paper is still expected to run the same amount of reviews, but now, they will be done on a freelance basis. Film critic Roger Ebert tweeted he would cancel his subscription.

Need a place to stay in Manhattan? Try the World Center Hotel, we hear the views of ground zero are fantastic. That, sadly, is the pitching of the new hotel, which opened last month. Several of the rooms have wall-size glass windows that look out on to the construction site. The vice president of the company that owns the World Center Hotel says "People choose to be here because they want to be close to it. They want to feel it, they want to celebrate. They want to remember. We have a very accessible view on it." The hotel’s Web site uses memorial images from September 11.

Police have found the skeletal remains on Saturday of Amber Dubois—a 14-year-old girl who disappeared last year and may have been killed by the same man suspected of killing Chelsea King. Dubois’s body was found on the Pala Indian Reservation in north San Diego County. DuBois was last seen walking with a man near her high school, about 10 miles from the location from which King disappeared. John Albert Gardner III stands accused of murdering and raping or attempting to rape King.

Congratulations Neva Morris of Ames, Iowa: At 114 years and 216 days old, you are now the United States’ oldest person. Sadly, that means the previous title holder has passed. Mary Josephine Ray died on Sunday at 114 years and 294 days old. Ray was born in Canada on May 17, 1895, and moved to the United States when she was 3. Ray was also the second-oldest person in the world at the time of her death, behind Japan’s Kama Chinen, who is 114 years and 301 days old. She is survived by two sons, eight grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren, and five great-great grandchildren.

Meryl Streep may have lost out on an Oscar, but at least she turned some heads: The actress wore a gown by Project Runway alumni Chris March for the second time this awards season. After wearing a black, belted gown by March to the Golden Globes, Streep went with him again at the Oscars, this time wearing a draped white gown. Streep’s choice of March is notable because typically he designs costumes. March tells the blog Tom & Lorenzo, “It really was a dream come true. Absolutely one of the best moments of my life."

Viewers were puzzled by the odd moment during Sunday’s Oscars ceremony when a red-haired woman in a purple dress interrupted—or as some called it, pulled a Kanye—the acceptance speech of Roger Ross Williams when the film Music by Prudence won for best documentary short. The woman turns out to have been Elinor Burkett, a producer of the film, whose fight with Williams over the film’s director got so bad it led to a lawsuit settled out of court. (She says the movie was her idea, and she wanted to focus on the whole band followed by the film, he wanted to focus on a single person.) Burkett claims Williams had refused to talk to her at other awards events, and that she wanted to go onstage to accept the Oscar, but Williams’s mother blocked her with a cane. Williams countered that Burkett had been removed from the project a year ago, that, though she had seen the band, he had done the work alone. “She pulled a Kanye,” he said. “And it's a shame, because this is such positive, happy film.”

A shooting at an 18-story Dallas office building injured at least three people, according to local news reports. The shooting took place at 11 a.m. at a building that houses several businesses, including the United Texas Bank. Fox News says the man shot a 63-year-old father and his 39-year-old son, both of whom are in stable condition, before shooting himself. Apparently, the shooter, who is in "very critical condition," knew both of his victims. Bank employees locked themselves in the vault when the shooting began.

President Obama will nominate retired Army Major General Robert A. Harding to be in charge of the Transportation Security Administration. Harding retired from the military in 2001 after 33 years of service, which included serving as deputy to the Army’s chief of intelligence and director of operations of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Two years after retiring, Harding founded Harding Security Associates, a defense contracting firm. This nomination comes in the wake of Erroll Southers’ decision to remove himself from consideration for the position in January, after reports that Southers misled Congress about an incident involving a background check of his ex-wife’s boyfriend in the ‘80s. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is expected to announce Harding’s nomination Monday.

The results of the weekend’s election in Iraq are still unknown, but the turnout will have American politicos green with envy: 62 percent of registered voters cast ballots—a slightly smaller percentage than Iraq’s 2005 election but still more than the 56.8 percent of Americans who turned out for the 2008 showdown between Barack Obama and John McCain. Voting was down in Baghdad, where only 53 percent of people voted, perhaps because of a series of bombs that went off early on Sunday. Results are not expected until later this week.

After the Federal Reserve failed us last financial crisis, it looks like we will soon learn if it learned its lesson: Senator Chris Dodd will propose this week that the Federal Reserve retain regulatory control over the 23 banks with more than $100 billion in assets, says the Financial Times. Now, hundreds of state-chartered institutions are saying “me too!”: According to the Times, they also want to remain under the Fed’s eye. Importantly the Fed will have the power to wind down companies that pose systemic risks to the system; in a concession to Republicans, a bankruptcy judge will serve as a check and balance against the Fed’s new power.

Following the devastation in Haiti and Chile, another earthquake hit, this one rattling six villages in eastern Turkey and killing at least 51 people, officials say. The preliminary magnitude was 6.0. Stone and mud-brick homes collapsed, as did the minarets of mosques. At least 100 were injured. The quake’s center was about 340 miles east of Ankara, and the village of Okcular looked to be the worst hit, with 17 dead and many homes toppled. One resident said the village was flattened: "Everything has been knocked down, there is not a stone in place.” Many people were asleep as the trembling began, and rescue workers are still pulling people from the rubble.

Restoring Dick Cheney's image may seem like a thankless task—his approval rating was 13 percent when he left office in 2009. But his daughter Liz has thrown herself at it enthusiastically. New York Magazine says that Cheney's attacks on President Obama have been encouraged by Liz, who’s even more aggressive and hawkish than he is. Bush aides were stunned by the former veep’s step back into the national debate just two weeks after Obama was inaugurated. But Liz Cheney’s tireless defense of dear ole dad has already helped change the public perception of him. She’s defended the Cheney legacy on TV some 40 times this year, and pushed her father into writing his memoirs. She sat for 30 to 40 hours of interviews with her dad’s official biographer, Stephen Hayes, and has been dedicated to defending his record. Right now, Liz Cheney’s biggest project is her dad’s memoir, which she’s playing a key role in researching. That is, unless she runs for Congress as soon as 2012: Journalist Joe Hagan says Cheney's appearance alongside his daughter at CPAC was carefully orchestrated to help boost her profile for a run.

Nearly 100 explosions went off in Baghdad in the hours before polls opened for Iraqis to choose a full-term parliament for just the second time since the American invasion, but turnout was still higher than expected. It could be a sign that insurgents are losing the grip they once had over the population. Sunnis did not boycott as they did in 2005, and there were few reports of voting irregularities. The election was a cliffhanger, but as polls closed, party leaders said that it looked like the parties of Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki and former Prime Minister Ayad Alawi had performed well, though neither likely captured an all-out majority. Al Maliki had campaigned on increasing security, Alawi on crossing sectarian lines. President Obama praised Iraqis for voting despite the violence.

The unpopularity of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner makes it easy to overlook a simple fact: His plan to rescue the U.S. economy worked. “My basic view is that we did a pretty successful job of putting out a severe financial crisis and avoiding a Great Depression or Great Deflation type of thing,” he tells The New Yorker’s John Cassidy, who was skeptical of the plan to subject banks to “stress tests” and take toxic assets off their hands. “We saved the economy, but we kind of lost the public doing it.” At the time, many critics wanted the Obama administration to nationalize banks, and Geithner now defends the decision not to. “That would have been a deeply transforming policy mistake,” Geithner says. “The country would have suffered for decades. We’d have spent hundreds of billions of dollars more that we didn’t need to spend, and would have been stuck in those institutions for years.” Why then is he so unpopular? “[Policymakers] screw up financial crises because the politics are horrible, and that deters action. They are slow and late and tentative and weak because they are scared to death of the politics. But sometimes a policymaker has to say, I’ll take pain now against pain later.”

Rahm Emanuel has become a lightning rod for criticism, with everything from the failures of comprehensive health care to the delay in closing Guantanamo Bay being blamed on Obama's chief of staff. The twist is that the criticism is coming from inside the Democratic Party. The call (for his resignation) may even be coming from inside the White House, reports The Hill. "There are people in the White House who are trying to get rid of Rahm, and they are leaking everything they can," said one Democratic strategist, who is close to Emanuel. He is viewed to be selling out the ideals of the party in favor of dubious pragmatism, making concessions that pull the Obama administration ever closer to the center. But others think that Emanuel is too easy a target. "They don't want to attack President Obama directly," said Lanny Davis, a former Clinton administration senior official. "They use Rahm Emanuel as a surrogate. I think the campaign to push Rahm out will fail."

It may have been a battle of the exes, but The Hurt Locker beat out Avatar to sweep the 82nd Annual Academy Awards. The film won Best Picture, and Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar for Best Director for The Hurt Locker—the first woman ever to do so. She called her win "the moment of a lifetime," and dedicated her award to "the men and women of the military who risk their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan—and may they come home safe." Sandra Bullock won the award for Best Actress, and Jeff Bridges took home the award for Best Actor. "Did I really earn this or did I just wear you all down?" a stunned Sandra Bullock asked the audience as she accepted the Oscar. She dedicated the award to "moms who take care of the babies and the children no matter where they come from." Precious made its mark when Mo'Nique, as expected, won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress just after Precious writer Geoffrey Fletcher upset Up in the Air, taking home the Academy Award for Best Adapted Sreenplay. The ceremony kicked off at Los Angeles' Kodak Theater with three expected awards—Christoph Waltz for Best Supporting Actor in Inglorious Basterds, Up for Best Animated Feature Film, and Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett for Best Song from a Feature Film for "The Weary Kind" from Crazy Heart.

We guess you have to take the bad with the good: Before winning Sunday’s best actress Academy Award for her performance in The Blind Slide, Sandra Bullock won the Razzie Award for worst actress in a film in 2009 for All About Steve. Bullock was at the Razzies on Saturday to accept the award. "Something tells me you all didn't watch the film," she said. "I thought no one went to see this film, but I know that there are more than 700 members here. That means that the majority of the 700 cast their vote, so that means 352…?" Bullock said that members only voted for her because she promised to attend. She also brought complimentary DVDs of All About Steve for the audience members.