"During the Monday beating incident, about 100 ruling party supporters arrived at dawn, ordering people from their houses in Dakudzwa and about seven other nearby villages to a central point near a Catholic church, according to witnesses interviewed by The Times by phone. About 400 villagers were gathered outside the church.
'They started telling us, 'We're not going to do anything, we're just campaigning. You're not supposed to vote for the opposition party. If you are opposed to the ruling party you should come up and confess and we won't do anything to you,' said Rebecca Vela. 'More than 10 confessed; they all got beaten. The women were beaten naked.'"
NYT: many schools have been closed and 121 have been taken over by militias linked to ruling party as a base of operations to give opposition backers a second chance to "mend their ways" in the run-off elections
"A member of ZANU-PF’s Politburo, speaking anonymously about its secret deliberations, said in an interview that the party had no intention of giving up power through the ballot box.
'We’re giving the people of Zimbabwe another opportunity to mend their ways, to vote properly,' the Politburo member said. 'This is their last chance.'
If voters fail to return Mr. Mugabe to office, the Politburo member told a Zimbabwean journalist working with The New York Times, 'Prepare to be a war correspondent.'"
BBC: "armed men" in Casamance region of Senegal cut off left ears of cashew harvesters
"The cashew-nut harvest time has regularly seen as upsurge in violence and armed attacks.
The Gambia lies between Casamance and the rest of Senegal and the MFDC rebels started a war for independence in 1982.
A peace deal was signed in 2004 but the armed robbery remains common in the area, badly hitting its once vibrant tourist industry."
WP: Ahmadinejad's claims draw ire of clerics
"Several clerics in the Iranian parliament accused Ahmadinejad of implying that Imam Mahdi or Imam Zaman (Imam of the Age), as the Shiite messiah is also called, supports his government. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran's government has been overseen by Shiite clerics, but religious leaders here have resisted Ahmadinejad's frequent hints that his government's actions are guided by the Mahdi."
Gdn: Whitehouse says it "lost" 5 million emails from early days of Iraq invasion
(didn't find this in any major US outlet)
USAT: 43,000 troops deployed, even though they had been declared medically "unfit for combat"
Gdn: former Guantánamo prisoner detonated suicide bomb in Iraq last month
BBC: US soldier accidentally calls home while in Afghanistan battle, leaves message on answering machine
"When he was played back the message, he said was embarrassed by all the swearing. 'He said, 'Don't let Grandma hear it',' Mrs Petee said."
BBC: the legacy of war and resettlement in Palestine and Israel 60 years later
Gdn: fighting between Hezbollah and gov't backers spreads beyond Beirut
"This morning, the rival sides exchanged gunfire in two villages in eastern Lebanon's Bekaa valley, with three people reported injured, according to security forces...'Beirut relives the chapters of sectarian and militia horror,' the pro-government An-Nahar newspaper said on its front page today. The opposition al-Akhbar newspaper said: 'Lebanon in the mouth of the dragon.'"
WP: paramilitary leader 'Macaco' extradited to US from Colombia
"Prosecutors in Colombia consider Jiménez one of the three most brutal warlords to have formed the directorate of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a coalition of paramilitary groups. The AUC, as the group was known, was assembled to fight rebels but morphed into Colombia's top drug-trafficking cartel while carrying out massacres and illegally seizing land."
Victims' advocate Ivan Cépeda lost a motion to block extradition to allow victims to confront him and seek reparations. "Cepeda's organization has estimated that Jiménez's paramilitary bloc killed and disappeared as many as 10,000 people. 'This superimposes drug trafficking over crimes against humanity,' he said."
BBC: Colombian military officer and troops sentenced to 50+ years for massacre of anti-narcotics police force in 2006
LAT: dual currency in Cuba punishes the poorest
"Those with jobs in hotels, airlines and shops and on the thriving black market earn CUCs, referred to as "the dollar" and worth about 25 times the peso. The peso is the currency given to all state workers and pensioners, which must be converted to CUCs to purchase most goods. The Cuban government retains the peso because it lacks sufficient foreign reserves to back and circulate only CUCs.
The U.S. dollar, which circulated in Cuba from the mid-1990s to late 2004, was removed by then-President Fidel Castro and now is subject to a 10% tax whenever it is converted to CUCs -- in effect a devaluation by the state. The tax is felt most by tourists and the estimated 10% of Cuban households receiving money from relatives abroad.
Those like Rosa, who have neither foreign benefactors nor the vigor to run their own dollar-earning schemes, watch the buying power of their moneda nacional recede each month as more goods become available only for 'dollars.'"
BBC: Germany bans two right-wing groups that deny Holocaust happened
WP: Bush's astute assessment of world food prices offends Indians
"'[W]hen you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food,' [Bush] said. 'And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.'
In the days since, Indian newspapers have published articles citing comparative food consumption statistics for the United States and India. One headline said, 'U.S. eats 5 times more than India per capita,' and quoted data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
A cartoon in the Times of India on Tuesday showed a couple of overweight American tourists looking at emaciated Indian men rummaging for leftover food in a trash heap. 'No wonder we're having food shortages back home in the States -- these guys in India have started eating way too much,' they say.
'Bush is shifting the blame to hide the truth. We all know that the food crisis is an outcome of the American policy of diverting huge land area from food to fuel production,' said Devinder Sharma, a food policy analyst and chair at the New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security. 'America has the largest land for ethanol production in the world.'
'If Indians start eating like Americans, the world would have to grow food on the moon,' he said."
The Caucus: Hillary's campaign will continue to offer citizens chance to mend their ways, even though it won't make a difference
"...the campaign advisers acknowledged some hard truths. Even if the Florida and Michigan delegations were seated, it would not be enough for a win. The financial health of the campaign appeared grim — Mrs. Clinton loaned herself $6 million last month, and she is prepared to donate more. And if there was good news to share about overnight on-line fund-raising totals, Mr. Wolfson did not mention it."
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