resurrections

NYT: local-level governance in Iraq, captain by (retiring) captain
"During the war in Iraq, young Army and Marine captains have become American viceroys, officers with large sectors to run and near-autonomy to do it. In military parlance, they are the “ground-owners.” In practice, they are power brokers. 'They give us a chunk of land and say, ‘Fix it,’ ' said Capt. Rich Thompson, 36, who controls an area east of Baghdad."
LAT: in some areas of Iraq, US trying to transition militia members into alternative sectors
LAT: Fallujah repopulated, "alive again"; but article fails to describe how it's been rebuilt
"To ensure continued security progress, Marines conduct late-night raids several times a week after picking up intelligence about possible insurgent activities. The troops also have sought to provide employment to young Falloujans to help win their loyalty."
Gdn: letters responding to article on Iraq fatality estimates

CSM: Herat strike for more security against criminal gangs
"Doctors, nurses, and other health providers walked out on their jobs to protest what they say are the government's half-hearted attempts to address a growing security problem. Shopkeepers, judges, and the city's main trade union soon joined them, prompting the closure of close to 250 factories.
The strike, which ended earlier this week, highlights widespread dissatisfaction with government efforts to provide security and illustrates the extent to which criminal gangs – not the Taliban – are seen as the biggest security threat in Afghanistan's major cities."

LAT: in Colombia, army units accused of increasingly killing civilians, labeling them as guerrillas
"Ramiro Orjuela Aguilar, a Bogota human rights attorney representing 20 families of suspected 'false positive' victims in Meta, blamed the military's use of paid informants or demobilized guerrillas for many of the killings.
'They have an incentive to name people as rebels because they are paid for information whether it's correct or not,' Orjuela said.
Several of the Meta victims last year were youths living in and around Granada, the hub of a cattle and farming region that has been fiercely contested in recent years by leftist guerrillas, the armed forces and right-wing paramilitary troops. It is also home to the army's 12th Mobile Brigade, a unit that Orjuela says is implicated in many of the killings.
Orjuela alleges that the army is engaging in 'social cleansing' in Meta, home to four of the five municipalities that made up the so-called neutral zone occupied by Colombian guerrillas from 1998 to 2002. Killings and mass displacements of residents here are efforts to deprive guerrillas of sympathizers, Orjuela said.
'They are trying to deprive the fish of its water,' he said."

NYT: violence between Tibetans and the Chinese state may influence voting in Taiwan

BBC: veterans of Bangladesh's 1971 independence war want collaborators of Pakistan tried for war crimes

BBC: Cyprus peace talks on again

BBC: Liberia launches its first census since 1984; pop song translated into 16 languages plays daily urging citizens to stay home to be counted

Slate: how early Christians understood resurrection
"The ancient Jewish and early Christian idea of personal resurrection represented a new emphasis on individuals and the importance of embodied existence beyond the mere survival or enhancement of the soul, although there was debate about the precise nature of the post-resurrection body...In the earliest expressions of their faith that we have, Christians claimed that Jesus' resurrection showed that God singled out Jesus ahead of the future resurrection of the dead to show him uniquely worthy to be lord of all the elect...In Christianity's first few centuries, when believers often suffered severe persecution and even the threat of death, those who believed in Jesus' bodily resurrection found it particularly meaningful for their own circumstances. Jesus had been put to death in grisly fashion, but God had overturned Jesus' execution and, indeed, had given him a new and glorious body. So, they believed that they could face their own deaths as well as those of their loved ones in the firm hope that God would be faithful to them as well."