strange parts of the world

BBC: Santa Cruz region of Bolivia seeks autonomy; referendum called for May 4 which Morales called illegal
"Four of Bolivia's nine provinces want greater autonomy. All are in the less indigenous and wealthy eastern lowlands, home to most of the country's oil and gas reserves.
Mr Morales says the push for autonomy is no more than an attempt by the rich minority to keep their long-held privileges, and to undermine his policies of helping the poor indigenous majority."

NYT: Petraeus to lead US Central Command; Odierno to take over in Baghdad...
CSM: in the new bunker (embassy) set to open next month
USAT: probably built (late, and way over budget) by one of the 60,000 US gov't contractors that owe $8 billion in taxes
one example: "The Defense Department paid more than $1 million to a company that owed nearly $10 million."
Slate: SecDef Gates and the bureaucracy
Slate: Iran in Iraq
"It is reasonable to ask what the hell is going on here. President Bush assisted Maliki's offensive as a campaign against Iranian-backed extremists. Now it turns out the Iranians are backing Maliki.
Much of the confusion is dispelled when you consider that the battle for Basra is not so much a military contest between the Iraqi government and outlaw rebels as a power struggle between rival Shiite mafias."

LAT: US intel reports that Al Qaeda alienating allies with tactics
"Analysts with U.S. and allied intelligence agencies differ over whether the backlash poses significant risks for Al Qaeda, or whether it is simply a public relations problem. The organization is expanding its pool of hard-core recruits, according to one U.S. counter- terrorism official. And Internet communications and other intelligence have shown that its anti-American message continues to resonate with extremists throughout much of the Islamic world.
But Al Qaeda also has sought to use regional groups to become more mainstream and expand its power base. It is in these groups that most of the conflict is occurring."

Gdn: US also less than tactically successful in Afghanistan and Somalia
"'The lack of strategic acumen present in the 'war on terror' in Somalia and Afghanistan is in fact enabling the spread of the insurgencies present throughout both countries,' said Norine MacDonald QC, [Senlis Council] president."
NYT: Afghan gov't trying to extend local governance
"Local governance is the buzzword on everyone’s lips, one Afghan development official said, shorthand for extending the government’s presence in the provinces, making it perform better and provide much needed public services."

BBC: Amnesty alleges that Ethiopian troops took 40 children in mosque massacre last week
"The Ethiopian forces said they would only release the children from their military base in north Mogadishu 'once they had been investigated' and 'if they were not terrorists,' witnesses told Amnesty."
BBC: meanwhile, pirates abound
"The BBC's Mohamed Olad Hassan in Somalia says many of the pirates are former fishermen, who began by attacking ships they argued were 'illegally threatening or destroying' their business.
'Businessmen and former fighters for the Somali warlords moved in when they saw how lucrative it could be. The pirates and their backers tend to split the ransom money 50-50,' he says."

BBC: after negotiations with new Pakistan gov't, local Taliban leader calls ceasefire

WP: Israel circulates video of North Koreans touring a Syrian plant, destroyed in Sept by Israel
unclear what explains the timing

WP: war fears prompt arms purchases in Lebanon
"One measure of...anxiety is the price of small arms: An AK-47 that went for $75 to $100 a year ago now costs $600 to $1,000."

NYT: arms shipment to Zimbabwe heads back to China
WP: more reports of terror in Zimbabwe
"Martin Mandava, 29, a farmer from Mutoko, one of many Mugabe rural strongholds that supported the opposition in the March 29 presidential election, told of how last week a gang of youths from the ruling ZANU-PF party stoned him, tied his arms and legs, then beat him with sticks. They gashed his head with an ax, he said, and threatened to stab his pregnant wife through the womb. Then the gang leader pulled down Mandava's pants, grabbed his genitals and held out a knife.
The leader asked the gang what should be done to an opposition supporter, Mandava recalled. The answer: His genitals should be cut off, to keep opposition party babies from being born there.
Mandava's wife screamed and covered the face of their 5-year-old child, he said. Then the leader offered to put his weapon away if Mandava could sing a song from Zimbabwe's liberation struggle, the guerrilla war led in the 1970s by Mugabe. Mandava sang the song."
NYT: Zuma supports unity gov't idea

BBC: unity in Kenya: Kibaki and Odinga tour "trouble spots" together

BBC: Muluzi staking a comeback in Malawi

NYT: fighting continued yesterday in Sri Lanka

WP: criminal networks on the rise, says US Justice Dept
"Officials said they worry that suspects motivated by greed could team up with more ideologically minded terrorists. Last month, arms trafficker Viktor Bout, the 'merchant of death,' was arrested in Thailand for allegedly conspiring to sell weapons to Colombian rebels."

Ind: Korean 'comfort women' keep fighting for recognition in Japan
"'The women's greatest fear is that when they die, the crimes against them will be forgotten,' said Ahn Sin Kweon, director of the Sharing House ["a museum and communal refuge" outside Seoul].
Thousands of Asian women – some as young as 12 – were 'enslaved ... and repeatedly raped, tortured and brutalised for months and years,' according to Amnesty International. Sexual abuse, beatings and forced abortions left many unable to bear children...Japan officially acknowledged wartime military slavery in a landmark 1993 statement, followed by the offer of compensation from a small private fund, which expired last year. But the so-called Kono statement has long baited Japanese revisionists, who deny the military was directly involved. 'The women were legal prostitutes, earning money for their families,' claims the revisionist academic Nobukatsu Fujioka.'"

New Yorker: (book review) Herodutus and history
"Herodotus’ Histories—a chatty, dizzily digressive nine-volume account of the Persian Wars of 490 to 479 B.C., in which a wobbly coalition of squabbling Greek city-states twice repulsed the greatest expeditionary force the world had ever seen—represented the first extended prose narrative about a major historical event. (Or, indeed, about virtually anything.) And yet to us graduate students in the mid-nineteen-eighties the word “father” seemed to reflect something hopelessly parental and passé about Herodotus, and about the sepia-toned “good war” that was his subject. These were, after all, the last years of the Cold War, and the terse, skeptical manner of another Greek historian—Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War, between Athens and Sparta, two generations later—seemed far more congenial. To be an admirer of Thucydides’ History, with its deep cynicism about political, rhetorical, and ideological hypocrisy, with its all too recognizable protagonists—a liberal yet imperialistic democracy and an authoritarian oligarchy, engaged in a war of attrition fought by proxy at the remote fringes of empire—was to advertise yourself as a hardheaded connoisseur of global Realpolitik.

Herodotus, by contrast, always seemed a bit of a sucker. Whatever his desire, stated in his Preface, to pinpoint the “root cause” of the Persian Wars (the rather abstract word he uses, aitiē, savors of contemporary science and philosophy), what you take away from an initial encounter with the Histories is not, to put it mildly, a strong sense of methodical rigor. With his garrulous first-person intrusions (“I have now reached a point at which I am compelled to declare an opinion that will cause offense to many people”), his notorious tendency to digress for the sake of the most abstruse detail (“And so the Athenians were the first of the Hellenes to make statues of Hermes with an erect phallus”), his apparently infinite susceptibility to the imaginative flights of tour guides in locales as distant as Egypt (“Women urinate standing up, men sitting down”), reading him was like—well, like having an embarrassing parent along on a family vacation. All you wanted to do was put some distance between yourself and him, loaded down as he was with his guidebooks, the old Brownie camera, the gimcrack souvenirs—and, of course, that flowered polyester shirt."

Slate: only nine more months of (unironic) statements like this
"Oftentimes people ask me, 'Why is it that you're so focused on helping the hungry and diseased in strange parts of the world?' "—[Bush], Washington, D.C., April 18, 2008