All the war-zone authenticity in the Arab world cannot salvage the silly Hollywood plot at the heart of “Green Zone,” Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass‘ first collaboration outside the Jason Bourne realm.

Their thriller about the futile search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a visual and visceral knockout that’s utterly deflated by a story as common, coarse and unappetizing as Army field rations.

The movie pales further by arriving in theaters just days after the Academy Awards triumph of the vastly superior Iraq war story “The Hurt Locker,” a film many people have yet to see. For the price of a couple of tickets to “Green Zone,” you can own the DVD of a truly great war film in “The Hurt Locker.”

“Green Zone” emulates the let’s-build-a-democracy-just-like-ours intent of the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003, as chronicled in Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” a book cited in the credits as the inspiration for the movie.

Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland have taken a setting rich with novel dramatic possibilities and made up a fictional action tale just like any other, with the same lame plot contrivances and the same stiff, artificial characters.

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YANGON, Myanmar – A new election law issued by Myanmar’s ruling military has barred pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from joining a political party and thus running in upcoming elections, state-run newspapers said Wednesday.

The Political Parties Registration Law, published in official newspapers, excludes anyone convicted by a court of law from participating in the elections.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who has spent 14 of the past 20 years in detention, was convicted last August of violating the terms of her house arrest by briefly sheltering an American who swam uninvited to her lakeside residence. She was sentenced to a new term of house arrest that is to end this November.

The sentence was seen as a way to keep Suu Kyi locked up during the election campaign. Last month, the Supreme Court dismissed her latest appeal for freedom.

The election law says that political parties have 60 days from Monday, when the law was promulgated, to register with an Election Committee whose members are to be appointed by the junta.

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BELFAST, Northern Ireland – Irish police arrested seven people Tuesday over an alleged plot to kill a Swedish artist who depicted the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog.

Police said four men and three women were detained in morning raids in the counties of Cork and Waterford on Ireland’s south coast. Under Irish anti-terrorist law they could be interrogated for up to a week before being charged or released.

Two police officers close to the investigation said those arrested were foreign-born Irish residents, mostly from Yemen and Morocco. The officers said the suspects had been under surveillance since November and were identified based on intelligence intercepts of e-mails and telephone calls monitored with help from anti-terrorist officials in the United States, Interpol and Sweden.

Both officers spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about details of the investigation.

The alleged target of the murder conspiracy, Swedish artist Lars Vilks, told The Associated Press he believed that the Irish arrests are linked to two telephone death threats he received in January over one of his drawings published in a Swedish newspaper in August 2007.

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – A U.S. missionary held for more than a month in Haiti on kidnapping charges flew back to the United States after being released from prison, while the leader of her Baptist group remained in custody.

Charisa Coulter and Laura Silsby were the last two missionaries still in custody of 10 that were arrested for trying to take 33 children out of Haiti after the earthquake. The other eight were released Feb. 17.

Coulter, 24, was freed Monday and whisked from her jail cell to the airport by U.S. Embassy staff.

Wearing a red tank top and sunglasses, she declined comment as she quickly got into an SUV that took her to the Haitian airport, where she caught a flight back to the United States.

Coulter’s father said his daughter arrived in Miami late Monday and went straight to a hotel.

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LONDON (Reuters) –
Celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz has arranged a deal with a private equity firm to sort out her debts, the Financial Times reported in its Tuesday edition.

The paper said Leibovitz, who has photographed everyone from Michelle Obama to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, has lined up real estate investment firm Colony Capital as a sole creditor to help manage her finances and market her work.

“We will be partners in managing her assets and her business so that Annie can spend her time and focus in pursuing her passion as only she can do,” Tom Barrack, founder of Los-Angeles-based Colony was cited as saying in the FT.

The firm will allow Leibovitz to hold onto the rights of more than 100,000 photographs and is considering plans to hold traveling photographic exhibitions, the FT said.

“We will be working on new projects and I will have the support and freedom necessary for nurturing my work and preserving my archive,” Leibovitz was cited as saying in the
FT.

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