intellectuals on the march [travel warning for prague]

AP: fighting quelled in Beirut, but spreading to eastern outskirts and northern Lebanon

AP: after defeating JEM attack on Khartoum, Sudan cuts ties with Chad

LAT: dispatch from the wall outside Sadr City
"For [Army Capt] Boyes' team, each attempt to add to the wall, which is designed to run the 3-mile length of Route Gold, is a combat mission. But the military has made it clear it won't cross the road, whose formal name is Al Quds Street, even as the Pentagon stepped up accusations that Iranian-backed fighters were using the area beyond as a base to launch attacks that have killed scores of U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians in the last month."
WP: and from an Iraqi-US patrol in Mosul
"Back at the outpost, [Lt] Baxter rounded up his men for a quick debriefing. Anything to report? he asked.
'The [Iraqi Army soldiers] suck,' a soldier said.
Another chimed in, 'And all the people we talked to today are liars.'"
LAT: helping one young bomb victim walk again

BBC: violence in Kashmir claims several lives

Adam Isacson: the FARC and Chávez - the veracity and contents of the recovered computer files of FARC leader Raúl Reyes

Ind: Oxfam warns that death toll could reach 1.5 million in Burma if junta continues to block supplies, access
NYT: op-ed recycled from 1990 - should the US pre-emptively invade? (for example, Burma?)
"In such clear-cut cases, would military intervention on human rights grounds be morally justified? If it is, a second question must be posed: How could the principle of big-power intervention on behalf of human rights be established without a future American or Soviet government perverting it to prop up, as in the past, repressive dictatorships? Could some effective international control mechanism be worked out - a Helsinki Accord with teeth?
I don't claim to know the answers. But the questions are certainly worth asking."

NYT magazine: Hmong leader, US ally during the Vietnam war, charged with conspiracy to overthrow Laotian government
"...though Vang Pao may have dreamed aloud of a glorious revolution in Laos in years gone by, his role in the conspiracy charged by the government may be hard to prove. The government presents the case as a clear-cut gunrunning conspiracy in violation of the Neutrality Act, which outlaws military expeditions against nations with which the United States is at peace. But the old general’s defenders contend that the case against him is the consequence of a misguided post-9/11 zeal. If convicted in a trial, the former American ally could face the rest of his life in prison. And already his indictment has apparently emboldened Laotian and Thai authorities to crack down on the beleaguered Hmong who remain in refugee camps or in hiding in the jungles of Laos [who were abandoned by the CIA when the US pulled out of Vietnam and attacked by the victors]."

LAT: the legacy of land redistribution in Zimbabwe
"So few have benefited from the land redistribution that Mugabe's broader support has been undermined among traditional allies such as the war veterans. But he was careful to ensure that the top military and security commanders, on whom he relies for protection and survival, got one or more farms.
With Mugabe looking increasingly precarious, analysts believe that in the end it will be the 'securocrats,' the 20 or so commanders who form the strategic Joint Operation Command, who will determine whether the president goes.
Mugabe began the land seizures in 2000, after he faced his first serious political threat: the emergence the year before of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change from the union movement, supported by white farmers.
Last month, Mugabe's regime began a new wave of evictions of the few remaining white farmers after it lost control of parliament for the first time since independence in 1980. He sent out his security forces in a campaign of intimidation targeting farmers, opposition supporters and activists."
BBC: the police continue to arrest opposition members

BBC: Basques, seafaring, and piracy

Gdn: intellectuals mobilizing to resist 'vulgar' city council vision for Prague
"The intellectuals of Prague - copies of Kafka to hand, fuelled by too many espressos and cheap cigarettes, black polo-necks and scarves to the ready - are on the march. After the stag nights, the coming of McDonald's and Starbucks, and the shopping malls, the final straw was a banal administrative order. Now the 'culture wars of Prague' are reaching their climax...The intellectuals' enemy is the city council. Last week an estimated 500 theatre directors, gallery owners, artists and writers demonstrated against a municipal order in effect cutting public subsidies."