lather. rinse. repeat.

africa
Ind: revenge and ethnic cleansing continue in Naivasha
"'We don't want bloodshed,' said Leonard Sindani. 'We want peace.' The crowd murmured its approval. 'But they must go. If they stay we will deal with them. There is no going back. This is the final plan.' The crowd roared its approval."
Gdn: military uses helicopters to protect refugees in Kenya
"Police said rubber bullets were fired from machine guns as the helicopters dived three or four times towards a crowd of more than 600 people brandishing machetes and clubs. Two police trucks prepared to evacuate the displaced Luos to safety."
Ind: opposition MP shot in Nairobi, where gang fighting continues in slums
Econ: map of the violence

Ind: fighting resumes in the Congo, breaking peace accord
"Tutsi fighters loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda and Pareco Mai Mai militia, who both signed a peace accord on Wednesday, blamed each other for the fighting around villages 70 km (44 miles) west of the town of Goma."

BBC: fighting in Mogadishu between insurgents and government forces; AU forces targeted as well

BBC: UN Darfur deployment will take all year

middle east
Gdn: militants killed in missile attack in North Waziristan, Pakistan
"US forces in neighbouring Afghanistan have fired missiles at militants on the Pakistani side of the border several times in recent years. Neither US nor Pakistani authorities officially confirm the attacks on Pakistani territory as they would constitute a violation of Pakistani sovereignty."
Gdn: child hostages released after shoot-out

Ind: analysis of the violence in Beirut
"Eight Shia Lebanese Muslims were killed in just two hours in the Mar Mikael district of the city in a shootout involving unknown assailants in – and this is the most sinister part of the carnage – the very streets where the 15-year Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975. Then it was a busload of Palestinians ambushed on their way home from the Tel el-Zaatar refugee camp. On Sunday night, it was a large group of Lebanese Muslims protesting against high prices and power cuts."

LAT: Gaza border breach sparks pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Egypt
"Mubarak's vast intelligence and security forces are attempting to prevent pro-Palestinian protests from erupting into sustained nationwide anti-government rallies. But the Muslim Brotherhood and Kifaya, Arabic for "Enough," an umbrella opposition group of leftists and nationalists, are determined to make just that happen. The Muslim Brotherhood has sponsored 80 demonstrations since Wednesday, when hundreds of thousands of Gazans began pouring into Egypt through a breached border wall."

NYT: 5 US soldiers die in Mosul ambush
"The attack on Monday underscored the grim situation in Mosul, Iraq’s northern hub, which remains a stronghold for Sunni extremist fighters...a powerful blast shook the city last Wednesday as Iraqi soldiers entered a building packed with thousands of pounds of explosives. The Iraqi Red Crescent Organization reported that at least 60 people had been killed and 280 wounded, mostly children, women and the elderly. The attack enraged residents, who were furious at government leaders for failing to protect them. The next morning, when the provincial police chief visited the site of the blast, he was stoned by a crowd of angry people who had been digging bodies of relatives from the rubble. As he tried to leave, he was assassinated by a suicide bomber."
Newsweek: Zakaria says the war's over and the mission should switch to peacekeeping
Slate: Bush dissembles about troop reductions
"President Bush said the proof of our strategy's success is that 'more than 20,000 of our troops are coming home.' (The congressional crowd went wild with applause.) These are the 20,000 troops that were sent over as part of the surge. The simple fact is that, by the summer, the 15-month deployment tours of the last of these surge brigades will have run out. There are no brigades ready to replace them. So, they will come home—and this would have been the case, no matter what had happened in the past year. The surge has always been short-term; that's why they called it a surge...Don't bet on any more troops coming home for good before Christmas. And if a reduction from 160,000 to 140,000 puts the situation back on the precipice, below which further cuts trigger disaster, then the situation cannot be considered at all stable."
LAT: the real estate market in Baghdad prices some out
NYT blog: global governance: Iraq signs on to Kyoto treaty

BBC: car bomb in Algeria kills 2
"That attack was claimed by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which was behind a string of similar bombings last year."

asia
Gdn: opposition leaders in Burma face 7 years in prison for fall demonstrations

Ind: new prime minister, a "celebrity chef," elected in Thailand

europe
BBC: Russia restricts election monitors
NYT: Gorbachev criticizes Kremlin
"...the final leader of the Soviet Union, sharply criticized the state of Russia’s electoral system in remarks published Monday and called for extensive reforms to a system that has secured power for President Vladimir V. Putin and the Kremlin’s inner circle."

Gdn: EU dangles incentives for Serbian electorate: trade and travel

NYT: 75th anniversary of Hitler's assumption of power tomorrow

americas
BBC: Fujimori on trial for ordering massacres during COIN against Shining Path; former death squad member testifies

BBC: FARC leader Ricardo Palmera, alias Simon Trinidad, sentenced to 60 years in the US for kidnapping 3 US contractors

Slate: shocker: Bush doesn't demonstrate learning in his cut-and-paste State of the Union
"Does he believe that the violent battles for power in these lands really come down to freedom vs. tyranny? If so, no wonder this government has had such a hard time getting a handle on these dangers, much less trying to engage them...It is a horrible shame, a dreadful legacy of this administration, that the majority of people in so many once-allied (or at least not-unfriendly) nations, particularly in the Middle East and Asia, regard America as a bigger threat than Iran and Osama Bin Laden. To think seriously about why these views exist, to address the perception in a serious way, doesn't mean accepting their validity. Not to think seriously about this question is to perpetuate our bad image and diminish our real security."

misc
Slate: beauty and regimes, or: where did all the hot tennis players come from?