tight in the eyes [lines, peaceful and violent]

LAT: wall still stands in Belfast, 10 years after peace deal
"...for dozens of front-line communities of Belfast, fences still make the best neighbors...In this city of 650,000, roughly half Catholic and half Protestant, only the university district and upper-class streets, chiefly on the south side, bear no clear-cut tribal identity...

[One Protestant] says his varied work experiences since -- as security guard, construction worker and now grocery store deliveryman -- mellowed him through regular social contact with Catholics...But he says that some neighborhoods, those most notorious for Irish Republican Army sympathies, give him the creeps...Catholic colleagues on occasion have invited him across the wall for an after-hours pint at their pub. He won't go.
'You'd be afraid that they might recognize you're from the other side. Am I too tight in the eyes?' he said, referring to a stereotype of Protestant eyes supposedly being closer together...

There are striking similarities between the experiences of the [Catholic] Quinns and the [Protestant] Youngs. Both feel safe living beside a peace line. Both say their problems come from hell-raisers within their own communities, not the other side. Both feel powerless to stop them.

Quinn said her previous neighborhood -- barely half a mile away in a sprawling, low-rise housing project -- was increasingly overrun by glue-sniffing, car-stealing teens. Such behavior was once brutally suppressed by IRA "kneecapping" squads. But the group has been keeping its 2005 promise to renounce bloodshed, and that means no more vigilante violence.

'The hoods have taken over. There's no telling them what to do. It's the Wild West,' she said.

Quinn says she has never called the cops to prevent a crime and doesn't think she ever will. Her attitude illustrates the other daunting task of peacemaking -- to build Catholic trust in what was once an overwhelmingly Protestant police force.

A sweeping reform program with affirmative-action recruitment over the last seven years has dramatically reshaped the police, with the goal of a 30% Catholic force. But many Catholics remain hostile to the police -- or fearful of being labeled collaborators.

So does she think the IRA should resume shooting teens in the legs? An uncomfortable silence follows.

'Well, I don't know. But the current situation is out of control,' she says finally...

"'I've really no problems with Roman Catholics,' Young said with a wry smile. 'It's my own kind that cause me the headaches. Maybe I need another peace line!'"

NYT: Lebanon faces sectarian violence
"He returned to this northern village only after family members won his release just over a week ago by threatening the kidnappers with retaliation. By that time Mr. Obaid, a Sunni Muslim, had gained a whole new way of seeing his Shiite countrymen and his native land.
'We cannot go back to how we lived with them before,' he said as he sat with relatives and friends at home here. 'The blood is boiling here. Every boy here, his blood is boiling. They push us, they push us, they push us.'"

LAT: rumors in China fuel panic
"Rumors are an integral part of Chinese folk history, songs and poetry. Last year, authorities drained a reservoir in central Sichuan province to dispel rumors that a growling water beast lived there. In 2006 a rumor spread in Anhui province that the virus that causes AIDS was being injected into watermelons, devastating sales.
Chinese emperors long sought to halt the spread across their far-flung empire, with the first recorded anti-hearsay campaign launched by King Li nearly 3,000 years ago, despite a proverb: 'Trying to stop people's mouths is like trying to stop a flood.'"

NYT: meanwhile, US downturn in economy means boon in denunciations for reward money
"Some coordinators suggest that rising crime rates might be driving up the number of tips. But in Jackson, Tenn., Sgt. Mike Johnson said his call volume had gone from two or three a day to eight or nine. He theorized that rising crime there was not a factor because the program advertises steadily regardless of trends. “People just need money,” Sergeant Johnson said...In some cases, the quality of the tips is lagging as people grasp for any shred of information that might result in an arrest. A woman in Macon, for example, recently called to report that a family member — who was wanted for burglary and whose name and address were already known to the police — was at home. His home. Such a tip might seem worthless on its face, said Jean Davis, who took the call. But many police departments do not have the personnel to watch a suspect’s comings and going. In that case, the young man was arrested."
(SV wonders if hotlines will disrupt the relationship between economic downturns and increased crime. Or if the denunciations are mostly useless.)

LAT: food prices offer opportunity for Islamic groups to give gifts, gain support

WP: pro-democracy protest organized on facebook in Egypt falls apart

WP: hundreds captured in Mosul sweep, just after Maliki offered amnesty
"[Al-Qaeda spokesman for Anbar] Janabi said that most fighters were warned in advance of the operation because the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government had trumpeted its plans for the offensive for weeks. The fighters, Janabi added, had moved their heavy weapons, along with "our explosives experts" and "engineers of our missile attacks," to other areas, while a small group of volunteers stayed behind to fight "a war of exhaustion" against Iraqi and U.S. forces."
LAT: US sniper uses the Koran for target practice; commanders pull him from duty, apologize

NYT: Chávez consolidates power, nationalizing private enterprises
McClatchy: meanwhile, his relationship with the FARC indicated by the guerrillas' communications, may not be enough to warrant sanctions

LAT: the crackdown on cartels in Mexico continues
"Pressured by the government, they say, the Sinaloa cartel is in retreat and disarray, split into factions that have turned on each other. Several mid- and high-ranking members of the gang have been arrested, and army troops already deployed in the region have seized drug shipments, destroyed opium poppy fields and seized more than 100 airplanes believed to be used by traffickers...The Sinaloa cartel is one of the oldest in Mexico. Founded by a few close-knit families and once dominant in Mexico's drug trade, it has been challenged over the last decade by the so-called Gulf cartel, based in the northeastern border state of Tamaulipas. But the Sinaloa traffickers still control Pacific smuggling routes that U.S. officials say have become the most popular for shipment of Colombian cocaine to the United States."

Gdn: Icelanders curiously happy
"Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together - loads of children, broken homes, absent mothers - and what you have, surely, is a recipe for misery and social chaos. But no. Iceland, the block of sub-Arctic lava to which these statistics apply, tops the latest table of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index rankings, meaning that as a society and as an economy - in terms of wealth, health and education - they are champions of the world."